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THE CHALLENGE 

OF 

SOCIAL SERVICE 



PRICE, T W E N T Y- F I V E CENTS A COPT 



THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

1. It is a challenge to fathers and mothers and all 
social workers to lift the burdens of labor from child- 
hood and to make education universal, 

2. It is a challenge to the men who make and admin- 
ister laws to organize society as a school for the devel- 
opment of all her citizens, rather than simply to be a 
master to dispose of the dependent, defective, and de- 
linquent population with the least expense to the State. 

3. -It is a challenge to all citizens to rally to the 
leaders of social reforms, so as to secure for the nation 
civic righteousness, temperance, and health. 

4. It is a challenge to American chivalry to see that 
justice is guaranteed to all citizens regardless of race, 
color, or religion, and especially to befriend and defend 
the friendless and helpless. 

5. It is a challenge to the Church to prove her right 
to social mastery by a universal and unselfish social 
ministry. 

6. It is a challenge to the present generation to 
show its gratitude for the heritage bequeathed to it 
through the toil and blood of centuries by devoting 
itself more earnestly to the task of making the nation 
a universal brotherhood. 

7. It is a challenge to strong young men and women 
to volunteer for a crusade of social service, to be en- 
listed for heroic warfare against all destroyers of social 
health and justice, and to champion all that makes for 
an ideal national life. 



•HANOAU-CRAIG-DICKCRSON CO. NA8MVIU.S 



THE CHALLENGE OF 
SOCIAL SERVICE 



EDITED BY 

JAMES E. McCUIvLOCH 



NASHVILLE 

SOUTHERN SOCIOLOGICAL CONGRESS 

1913 






CONTENTS 



The Social Program of the Congress. 

Organization of the Congress. 

I. The Social Program of the Church, 

Professor Walter Rauschenbusch, D.D., Rochester, 
N. Y. 

II. The Drag on Modern Civilization, 

Rev. Henry Stiles Bradley, D.D., Worcester, Mass. 

III. The Control of Social Diseases, 

Powhatan S. Schenck, M.D., Norfolk, Va. 

IV. The Negro Working Out His Own Salvation, 
Prof. E. C. Branson, A.M., Athens, Ga. 

V. Modern Ideas of Administration in the Govern- 
ment of Workhouses and Penal Institutions, 
Warden W. H. Whittaker, Occoquan, Va. 

VI. The Protestant Church and Social Service, 

Rev. Charles S. Macfarland, Ph.D., D.D., New 
York City. 



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Alitor 

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SEP 23J8|4 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 



The second session of the Southern Sociological Con- 
gress was held in Atlanta, Ga., April 25th to 29th, 1913. 
Ninety-six speakers were on the program. All the im- 
portant addresses and findings of this memorable conven- 
tion are published in a handsomely bound volume of over 
500 pages, entitled "The South Mobilizing for Social 
Service.' , The six addresses in this booklet are published 
also in this form by special request of many members and 
by the aid of the founder of the Congress in order to give 
these messages a wider circulation than is possible through 
the larger volume. Editor. 



THE SOCIAL PROGRAM OF THE CONGRESS 



The Southern Sociological Congress stands : 

For the abolition of convict lease and contract 
systems, and for the adoption of modern principles 
of prison reform. 

For the extension and improvement of juvenile 
courts and juvenile reformatories. 

For the proper care and treatment of defectives, 
the blind, the deaf, the insane, the epileptic, and the 
feeble-minded. 

For the recognition of the relation of alcoholism 
to disease, to crime, to pauperism, and to vice, and 
for the adoption of appropriate preventive measures. 

For the adoption of uniform laws of the highest 
standards concerning marriage and divorce. 

For the adoption of the uniform law on vital 
statistics. 

For the abolition of child labor by the enact- 
ment of the uniform child labor law. 

For the enactment of school attendance laws, that 
the reproach of the greatest degree of illiteracy may 
be removed from our section. 

For the suppression of prostitution. 

For the solving of the race question in a spirit of 
helpfulness to the negro and of equal justice to both 
races. 

For the closest co-operation between the Church 
and all social agencies for the securing of these re- 
sults. 



ORGANIZATION OF THE SOUTHERN SOCIOLOGICAL 

CONGRESS 



OFFICERS 

President Gov. William H. Mann, Richmond, Va. 

First Vice President Rev. John E. White, D.D., LL.D., Atlanta, Ga. 

Second Vice President Mrs. J. A. Baker, Houston, Tex. 

Treasurer Mr. M. E. Holderness, Nashville, Tenn. 

General Secretary Mr. J. E. McCulloch, Nashville, Tenn. 

Founder Mrs. Anna Russell Cole, Nashville, Tenn. 

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 

Gov. William H. Mann, Chairman Richmond, Va. 

Gov. Ben. W. Hooper Nashville, Tenn. 

Mrs. W. L. Murdock Birmingham, Ala. 

Prof. C. H. Brough Fayetteville, Ark. 

Dr. Wickliffe Rose Washington, D. C. 

Prof. L. L. Bernard Gainesville, Fla. 

Mr. W. Woods White Atlanta, Ga. 

Mr. Bernard Flexner .Louisville, Ky. 

Prof. B. C. Caldwell Natchitoches, La. 

Miss Elizabeth Gillman- Baltimore, Md. 

Dr. W. S. Leathers University, Miss. 

Prof. C. A. Ellwood Columbia, Mo. 

Ma*. Clarence Poe Raleigh, N. C. 

Mr. H. Huson • Oklahoma City, Okla. 

Judge J. A. McCullough Greenville, S. C. 

Mr. W. R. Cole Nashville, Tenn. 

Prof. C. S, Potts Austin, Tex. 

Dr. J. T. Mastin Richmond, Va. 

Prof. E. H. Vickers Morgantown, W. Va. 

Mr. M. E. Holderness .Nashville, Tenn. 

Mr. J. E. McCulloch, Secretary Nashville, Tenn. 

CHAIRMEN OF STANDING COMMITTEES 

Public Health Dr. W. S. Rankin, Raleigh, N. C. 

Courts and Prisons Hon. John H. DeWitt, Nashville, Tenn. 

Child Welfare Dr. A. J. McKelway, Washington, D. C. 

Organized Charities Mr. J. C. Logan, Atlanta, Ga. 

Race Problems Dr. J. H. Dillard, New Orleans, La. 

Church and Social Service Dr. John A. Rice, Fort Worth, Tex. 



STATE CORRESPONDING SECRETARIES 

Judge W. H. Thomas Montgomery, Ala. 

Mr. M. A. Auerbach Little Rock, Ark. 

Mr. Walter G. Ufford Washington, D. C. 

Dr. Lincoln Hulley Deland, Fla. 

Miss Eleanor Raoul Atlanta, Ga. 

Miss Frances Ingram Louisville, Ky. 

Miss Jean M. Gordon New Orleans, La. 

Mr. J. W. Magruder Baltimore, Md. 

Mr. Alfred Holt Stone Dunleith, Miss. 

Mr. Roger N. Baldwin St. Louis, Mo. 

Miss Daisy Denson Raleigh, N. C. 

Miss Kate Barnard Oklahoma City, Okla. 

Miss E. McClintock Columbia, S. C. 

Mr. James P. Kranz Memphis, Tenn. 

Mr. R. J. Newton Austin, Tex. 

Dr. E. G. Williams Richmond, Va. 

Mrs. Rebecca Altstaetter Wheeling, W. Va. 



THE SOCIAL PROGRAM OF THE CHURCH 

PROF. WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH, D.D., ROCHESTER, N. Y. 

It is Sunday afternoon. I am to speak for the Church 
and to the Church. What special contribution can the 
Church make to the solution of our social questions? The 
Church is by far the most powerful voluntary organization 
in our country. All the fraternal organizations taken to- 
gether number only about twelve million members. All the 
Churches of America together number about thirty-three 
million communicants. The Church has a majestic history, 
beside which all other organizations are mere upstarts. It 
has the Holy Book with its tremendous dynamic of freedom 
and righteousness. It is organized for the highest ends, 
the only organization created solely for the kingdom of God. 
Business is for money and moves toward profit. States- 
manship seeks the good of the people, but necessarily moves 
toward concrete minor ends and must adapt itself to imme- 
diate needs. On the other hand, the Church should seek 
out the polestar of justice and truth and lay down the per- 
manent north and south lines of all human action, planning 
all social life according to the will of the Eternal. 

Therefore, the Church should have the highest and 
bravest, the most far-reaching and revolutionary social pro- 
gram. It has such a program in the idea of the reign of God 
on earth. Every time we recite the Lord's Prayer we pray 
for an ideal social condition on earth : "Thy kingdom come. 
Thy will be done on earth." What wrong would survive and 
what rights would be suppressed if that petition were ful- 
filled? 

But, if we ask for any detailed program to realize this 
social reign of God on earth, where shall we find it? Shall 
we look in the ancient creeds of the Church, the Nicene, the 
Athanasian, the Creed of Trent, the Westminster Confes- 
sion? You will find in these creeds affirmations about 
purgatory and prayers for the dead, about predestination 



8 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

and the antichrist, but only in a few will you find even a 
germ of a social program for the Church. 

This is not strange if one understands the history of 
religion, and also if one understands how recent scientific 
social thought is in the modern world. Adam Smith's 
"Wealth of Nations," which marks the beginning of modern 
political economy, was published only in 1776. The Church, 
in common with all humanity, lacked a scientific understand- 
ing of social laws. The very idea of a continuous, sys- 
tematic, conscious, and determined social progress is new. 
To-day there is a concerted movement running through all 
the civilized nations. Humanity is on the march, and one 
social group after the other is falling in line. But this is a 
situation unparalleled in history, and when God looks upon 
this earth it may seem to him the most wonderful thing he 
sees here. 

To-day a social program is becoming possible, and in the 
last five years a number of great denominations have formu- 
lated a definite program for social action and advance. The 
program adopted by the Federal Council of the Churches in 
1908, and expanded and reaffirmed in 1912, comes nearest 
to being a definite social program of the Protestant Churches 
of America. If it had been adopted and measurably carried 
into effect fifty years ago, how much of sin, of shame, of 
degradation, and of death would it have saved our country? 
Let me read to you this program : 

"The Churches must stand — 

"For equal rights and complete justice for all men in all 
stations of life. 

"For the protection of the family by the single standard 
of purity, uniform divorce laws, proper regulation of mar- 
riage, and proper housing. 

"For the fullest possible development for every child, 
especially by the provision of proper education and recrea- 
tion. 

"For the abolition of child labor. 

"For such regulation of the conditions of toil for women 
as shall safeguard the physical and moral health of the com- 
munity. 



THE SOCIAL PROGRAM OF THE CHURCH 9 

"For the abatement and prevention of poverty. 

"For the protection of the individual and society from 
the social, economic, and moral waste of the liquor traffic. 

"For the conservation of health. 

"For the protection of the worker from dangerous ma- 
chinery, occupational diseases, and mortality. 

"For the right of all men to the opportunity for self- 
maintenance, for safeguarding this right against encroach- 
ments of every kind, and for the protection of workers from 
the hardships of enforced unemployment. 

"For suitable provision for the old age of the workers 
and for those incapacitated by injury. 

"For the principle of conciliation and arbitration in in- 
dustrial disputes. 

"For a release from employment one day in seven. 

"For the gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours 
of labor to the lowest practicable point, and for that degree 
of leisure for all which is a condition of the highest human 
life. 

"For a living wage as a minimum in every industry, and 
for the highest wage that each industry can afford. 

"For the most equitable division of the product of in- 
dustry that can ultimately be devised. 

I said that the Church has no formulated social program. 
But it has always had an unwritten program wrought into 
its very constitution and life. You know that the destiny 
of our lives is not determined by formal resolutions so much 
as by the deep-running forces of our nature. Here is a 
girl in high school, vowing that she will never marry, but 
will devote herself to the high ends of art. But all the 
time Nature has her by the hand and is leading her toward 
love and home and the children that are to be. Paul said 
that he was called to the ministry while yet in his mother's 
womb. 

So with the Church. Its program was set for it in its 
historical origin and in the mission for which it exists. Its 
origin is Jesus Christ. Its -mission is the reign of God on 
earth. We have misunderstood and forgotten both. But the 
Church cannot get away from either; they make up her 



10 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

destiny. The history of the Church is a strange mingling 
of sin and holiness. She has caged Christ in her temples, 
blanketed him in her vestments, muffled his voice with her 
theologies, and for centuries, if he had reappeared in the 
midst of his own Church, the Church would have imprisoned 
and killed him with far greater precision than the Jewish 
Church did it. Yet she cannot keep him down. His ideas 
always reemerge. His spirit is always reincarnated. At her 
worst times Jesus still haunted her; at her best times he 
overpowered her. He is always struggling for utterance in 
her life. Paul says that the Holy Spirit prays in us with 
groanings that cannot be uttered. So Christ seeks utter- 
ance in the life of the Church. He is her subconscious mind. 
The Church ought to be the socialized mind of Christ. 

Have you ever felt an overwhelming sense of the social 
wrong about us or seen a real vision of possible justice 
reigning in humanity? If you have, "quench not the Spirit." 
This is your chance of experiencing inspiration. From the 
subterranean reservoirs the surface waters come up : some- 
times as an artesian well; more often as a spring bubbling 
up under the root of a tree on the hillside. So the inspira- 
tion of Christ may come as a storm over the soul, or as a 
gentle welling-up of the water of life. But in such experi- 
ences you may pass through a mental regeneration that will 
make a social Christian of you, and bring you in line with 
that inwrought semiconscious social program which the 
Church had had from the beginning. 

Can we undertake to state a few of the fundamental de- 
mands of this program of the Church? 

1. It is part of the program of the Church to establish 
as an automatic conviction in the popular mind the belief 
in the worth of a man's personality. Jesus always rec- 
ognized it, not only in the finer and nobler specimens of 
humanity, but in the poor and sinful. He rejoiced when the 
publican showed that he too was a child of Abraham. He 
championed the great sinner and pointed out the beautiful 
tact of her affection. Why did he stoop down and write in 
the dust when they dragged that woman into the temple 
before him fresh from her sin? Was it not because he 



THE SOCIAL PROGRAM OF THE CHURCH 11 

could not bear to look on her public shame? He put the 
same penalty on calling a man a worthless fool which others 
had put on murder. It is a murder of the soul to paralyze 
a man's sense of his own worth. 

The Church must stand for the same valuation of human 
personality. The State sees in the man a citizen, a producer 
of goods, a soldier. The Church sees in him also a soul, a 
child of God, a brother of Christ, a being of eternal value 
even when he is at his lowest. 

There is a tremendous social program simply in that 
affirmation. A man is not then a mere thing, a blind pro- 
ductive tool, a mere "hand," not a commodity that can be 
bought in the cheapest market and used up like any other 
raw material to make wealth for stockholders. A woman is 
not a mere instrument for pleasure. Woe to us if we crush 
or make hideous the image of God ! This is enough to settle 
the attitude of the Church toward pauperism, unemploy- 
ment, child labor, prostitution. 

The Church must create respect for the worth of a man, 
not only in others, but in himself. It must rouse him from 
his self-contempt and put aspiration and hope into him. It 
must create in him the Christian combination of self-asser- 
tion and self-surrender. In the past it has taught the latter 
more than the former. The ruling classes always and every- 
where resent an increasing self-assertion on the part of the 
working class as if it were the beginning of evil, whereas it 
is really the beginning of virtue. 

2. One special part of the social program of the Church 
is to care for those who are least capable of caring for them- 
selves. Jesus emphasized the interest in "the least of these" 
as a mark of discipleship. Whoever offended "one of the 
least of these" and harmed his spiritual stature deserved a 
millstone around his neck. He always stood at bay over the 
little ones, as if he said to cruel and Pharisaic society: 
"Don't you dare to hurt my little sister and brother!" The 
State must adjust itself to the average man. The Church 
must especially adjust itself to those who are below the 
average. The Church has always had that spirit in it, but 
it has often pauperized those whom it desired to help by 



12 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

its charity. If it now adds scientific knowledge and pre- 
ventive methods to its ancient love, it will have a social pro- 
gram. 

3. It is part of the program of the Church to help all 
men to a full salvation. But a decent material and spiritual 
environment are necessary to a full salvation. It is mockery 
to plant a seed and give it no soil to grow in. It is a crime 
to beget a child and create no family life in which that child 
shall be nurtured. So it is but half of our religious work 
to summon young souls to a noble and holy life if we then 
pay them $3.50 per week, place them in slums, and let the 
soot of sin settle all over them. Let us combine our doctrine 
of regeneration with common sense, as in fact we do in the 
case of our own children. My Christian friends who oppose 
the doctrine of the saving or damning power of environ- 
ment have given away their case when they fight the saloon. 
The saloon, with its tastes and smells and pleasures, is part 
of the environment of the young. If environment counts 
for nothing, why do we not preach salvation and let the 
saloon alone? 

4. The program of the Church always and everywhere 
involves that it shall bring redemption to the lost. The de- 
linquent and criminal classes are surely the lost. They are 
the sheep that have strayed off while the rest of us have 
stayed within the fold of respectability. How does the re- 
demptive program of the Church affect penology ? Hitherto 
the treatment of delinquents and criminals has been deter- 
mined by the instinct of fear and revenge on the part of the 
possessing and powerful classes. There has been very little 
redemption in it. In fact, we might well say that prison 
life cuts off most of the saving influences. It takes a man 
away from his wife and all womanly influences. It shuts him 
off from the light that shines in the faces of children, from 
the good will of friends, from the wholesome influence of use- 
ful labor, from the chance of earning and the hope of pro- 
viding for the future. It leaves only the saving influence of 
solitary brooding and meditation. We do not subject our 
prisoners to a maximum of redemptive influences, but to a 



THE SOCIAL PROGRAM OF THE CHURCH 13 

minimum of redemption. For ages we have put them as 
near hell as we could. 

It should be part of the permanent social program of 
the Church to change our vindictive penal system into a re- 
formatory and redemptive system. As Christians we should 
back up those judges and public officers who are trying to do 
it. One sure step in that direction is to abolish contract 
labor in the prisons. I pray for the blessings of God on this 
Congress for setting a declaration against contract prison 
labor at the head of all its declarations. It is hard enough 
for a poor man to fall into the hands of an exploiting cor- 
poration. But when the State uses its coercive powers to 
back a prisoner into a corner while the corporation exploits 
him, such a situation cries to Heaven. It is essentially the 
same combination which made the Congo rubber trade 
infamous. You and I are the State. What the State does, 
we do. 

5. It is the social program of the Church to create a 
spirit in men that will make wrong intolerable to them. 
We are all keen about our own wrongs and indifferent to the 
wrongs of others. We are keen about the wrongs of our own 
class; but when our social sympathy has to pass over to 
some other race, or nation, or religion, or class, the cry for 
help beats against sound-proof walls. It is as if a bit of 
rubber were inserted in the electric circuit of sympathy. 
Industrialism de-sensitizes us against wrong. The Church 
must sensitize. Woe to the Church if it ever sanctions in- 
difference or contempt between nations, or religions, or 
social classes, or human races, circumscribing thereby the 
area of love and checking the growth of the Christian spirit 
among us ! Woe to the Church if it ever dopes men with 
spiritual anaesthetics by half -true doctrines about the value 
of suffering and poverty! It then becomes a traitor force 
in human society. 

6. It is inherent in the social program of Christianity 
to reach out beyond all minor groups toward a realization 
of all humanity. So Jesus reached out beyond the boundary 
of Judaism toward international humanity. The Church 
was the pioneer in making the idea of humanity effective in 



14 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

the ancient world. All our modern developments are calling 
for an international organization of the nations in the in- 
terest of justice and peace. This is an immense task for 
generations to come. The interests of the State may often 
be against it. The Church must support that movement 
with its great moral force. It must teach us all an undying 
hatred for war, not simply because it is expensive and dam- 
ages trade, but because it kills and brutalizes men and is 
the reverse of the kingdom of God. 

The Church must not usurp the place of the State, nor 
meddle in party politics. But the doctrine of the separation 
of Church and State becomes a danger when we forget that 
the Church is one of the chief molding forces within society. 
All righteous action becomes easy when the Church coop- 
erates with it. Then freedom, justice, and fraternity become 
realizable. If the Church opposes such causes, they must 
struggle painfully toward partial realization or failure. The 
Church is so powerful that it can tie up all progress if it is 
so minded. Let us pray that we may have not only stronger 
Churches, but also the right kind of Churches. 

Thus, there is an immense unfulfilled social program con- 
tained in the personality and mind of Jesus Christ and in the 
mission to realize the reign of God on earth. Any teacher 
or leader who is concerned only in personal ethical conduct 
is sure to slight and misdirect even that. All social ques- 
tions are moral questions on a large scale. We must con- 
vert our half-conscious and ill-defined ways and methods 
into clear and concerted plans. 

This is the call of the new age to the ancient Church. I 
believe that it will meet the call because within it is the 
never-dying, ever-youthful, ever-insurgent Spirit of Jesus 
Christ. 



THE DRAG ON MODERN CIVILIZATION 15 

THE DRAG ON MODERN CIVILIZATION 

REV. HENRY STILES BRADLEY, D.D., WORCESTER, MASS. 

My purpose to-day is to make a very rapid survey of the 
progress of the human race from savagery to the present 
state of civilization, point out the more important stages in 
its advance, and the reason for each forward movement, 
and then consider one of the most serious clogs upon present 
civilization, with a suggestion as to its elimination. 

If we accept the estimates of the best-informed students 
in geology, anthropology, and history, we shall allow for 
the time of man's residence on the earth a little more than 
100,000 years. Of this time, about 75,000 years were spent 
in savagery, about 20,000 in barbarism, and about 7,000 in 
civilization. 

Let us follow the student as he further subdivides these 
periods into three each. We shall then have three stages 
of savagery, three of barbarism, and three of civilization. 

The first period of savagery began when our early human 
ancestors emerged from their long contest with the other 
animals of the earth and took their places at the head of the 
created line. They were human beings, but that is about all 
one could say for them. They had no written language, no 
speech; they wore no clothes; their food consisted of raw 
fruits, nuts, and vegetables; they made their homes in trees. 

The first great step forward came with the discovery of 
the use of fire, which marks the beginning of the second 
period. Fire enabled early man to extend his dominion, 
for by its use he was able to temper climate, and for the 
first time in his history could live beyond the limits of trop- 
ical and subtropical zones. It enabled him also to cook 
his food, and rendered digestible many articles which be- 
fore he could not eat. During this period the first great 
migrations of the race began. 

The third savage period began with the invention of the 
bow and arrow. These weapons enlarged the field and 
augmented the work done by the use of fire. They enabled 



16 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

man not only to contend with ferocious beasts to better ad- 
vantage, but also to bring down his game at a distance. 
The skins of the animals furnished him clothes and tents, 
and these made possible still further migrations. 

The first period of barbarism began with the invention 
of pottery. Prior to that time there had been no cooking 
except that by roasting and broiling, but the discovery of 
the use of pots made it possible for early man to stew his 
foods, and so render much food suitable for consumption 
that before could not be used. It also meant greater clean- 
liness, since hot water is a better cleanser than cold water. 

The second period of barbarism began with the domesti- 
cation of plants and animals. Probably the first animal 
domesticated was the dog, but there followed in time the 
sheep, the ox, the horse, and the camel. This meant a still 
further extension of his territory. Man now became for 
the first time a traveler, a herdsman, and a dairyman. It 
also made it possible for him to have a home. He was no 
longer of necessity a nomad. It brought a larger inde- 
pendence because it made possible the individual ownership 
of property. Prior to this time property belonged to the 
family or the tribe. It also marked the beginning of a 
crude commerce, for the man who holds something in his 
own right is free to trade with his fellow. 

The third period of barbarism began with the dis- 
covery of the process of smelting iron. Up to this time man 
had used only flint and stone implements. The employment 
of iron for weapons and implements meant more extensive 
wars and conquests, better cultivation of the soil, better 
roads, and better houses in which to live. It is probable that 
it also marks the beginning of art, for the reason that some 
leisure was afforded, and better implements made possible 
the expression of a dawning sestheticism. 

We speak of these last three periods as barbarism be- 
cause there was no written language. It seems a great 
pity that for lack of a method of transmitting to posterity 
the record of what was going on we have entirely lost 
the story of the experiences through which our early an- 
cestors passed. 



THE DRAG ON MODERN CIVILIZATION 17 

The first period of civilization began with the invention 
of hieroglyphics and written language. Here we have the 
first crude literary compositions. During the periods of 
savagery and barbarism early man had mastered climate 
and animals ; during the first period of civilization he began 
the mastery of time. Before this it was impossible to leave 
to posterity the story of adventure, moral conflicts, dreams, 
and spiritual longings. It is true that oral tradition tended 
to supply this lack, but the story that passes from mouth 
to mouth from generation to generation becomes corrupt. 
No doubt many of the early stories of the human race 
which are recorded as fact were dreams which our ances- 
tors found impossible to relate except as stories of actual 
happenings. It would be difficult to overestimate the im- 
portance of the power to transmit to posterity the record 
of the experiences through which the generations pass. By 
it each generation is enabled to see the struggles of those 
that have gone before, avoid their mistakes, and improve 
upon their successes. 

It was during this first period of civilization that the 
Egyptians, Babylonians, Hittites, Phoenicians, Carthagin- 
ians, Greeks, and Romans flourished. That period was char- 
acterized chiefly by its wars. Man's efforts seem to have 
been centered upon subduing or exterminating his neigh- 
bor. The fighting, however, was with bludgeons, bows and 
arrows, spears, swords and battering-rams, and the con- 
flicts therefore were chiefly hand to-hand grapples. 

This period lasted about six thousand years, and during 
that time there seems not to have been one single impor- 
tant discovery or invention. The human race walked 
round and round in a circle. There is, however, one great 
exception which, while it may not be set down in the same 
category with the discovery of fire or the smelting of iron, 
must be reckoned ultimately as the most far-reaching of 
all influences. I refer to the religious development, especial- 
ly to the teachings of the great prophets and Christ. 

The second period of civilization was marked by the in- 
vention of gunpowder, the mariner's compass, paper- 
making, the printing press, and the astronomical work of 

—2 



18 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

Copernicus. These five revolutionizing inventions and dis- 
coveries came about the fifteenth century. Up to this time 
man had regarded the earth as a flat disc, the center of a 
very small universe. He now came to recognize it as a 
sphere whirling through space. Gunpowder revolutionized 
warfare ; the mariner's compass extended man's dominion to 
regions beyond the seas; paper and the printing press 
meant the wide diffusion of knowledge. Human intelli- 
gence developed marvelously. Such names as Shakespeare, 
Bacon, Columbus, and Galileo belong to this period. It 
lasted about four hundred years. 

The third period of civilization began about the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century, and must be regarded as in 
most respects the most remarkable period of the race. It 
was ushered in with the discovery of the steam engine and 
the invention of the loom, and there followed in quick 
succession the theory of evolution, the germ theory of dis- 
ease, the aseptic treatment of wounds, the use of anaesthetics 
in surgery, etc. 

We have seen greater changes during the last century 
than in the previous one hundred centuries. We moved for- 
ward from twenty-three to eighty chemical elements, from 
gunpowder to nitroglycerin, from the stairway to the ele- 
vator, from the candle to the arc light, oil and gas, from the 
sail vessel to the ocean liner, from sunlight to the Ront^en 
rays, from an opaque body to the transparent, from the flint- 
lock to the automatic quick-firing gun, from the scythe to the 
combined harvester, from leather fire buckets to chemical 
engines, from block printing to Webb and Hoe presses and 
the linotype, from the spinning wheel to cotton and wool 
factories, from the goose quill to the typewriter and foun- 
tain pen, from pain to anaesthetics, from running sores 
to asepsis, from beacon fires to Marconigraphs and cable- 
grams, from wood and stone to steel building material, from 
drawings and paintings to photography, from the horse and 
mule to the automobile, from the needle to the sewing 
machine, from flint, steel, and punk to the friction match, 
from winter ice to artificial refrigeration, from sundials 
and grandfathers' clocks to chronometers set by electricity, 



THE DRAG ON MODERN CIVILIZATION 19 

from unheralded weather to meteorology and weather bu- 
reaus, from the photograph to moving pictures and kinema- 
color, from horse cars to railroads, from human musicians 
to self -playing instruments, from thirty-four years to forty- 
one years as the average longevity, from balloons to dirigible 
airships and biplanes. 

Let me recapitulate briefly. Savage man's energy was 
directed to overcoming climatic conditions; the barbarian's 
was directed to the mastery of plants, animals, and min- 
erals ; the first stage of civilization was directed toward kill- 
ing one another, one man trying to master his neighbor ; the 
second period of civilization came in the direction of energy 
toward the accumulation of knowledge about the earth and 
the promulgation of that knowledge; the third period has 
been one characterized by scientific discoveries, the accumu- 
lation of wealth, and the mastery of pure physical forces. 

What is left unmastered? What is the direction in 
which man must expend his energy in the days to come? 
What is the new line of advance? It was a long step for- 
ward from the little reap hook used by Ruth the gleaner 
who followed Boaz about the harvest field to MeCormick's 
reaper or the combined harvester. Ruth's sickle placed be- 
side a combined harvester seems quite insignificant. There 
was a long step forward from the needle with which Dorcas 
made garments for the poor in the little town of Joppa to 
the Singer sewing machine. The needle placed beside the 
sewing machine seems quite insignificant. There was a 
long step forward from the stylus Paul used in the Roman 
prison, when he signed his letters to his friends in Philippi, 
to the modern typewriter or linotype. The stylus placed 
beside the linotype seems quite insignificant. But if we 
should stand Ruth and Dorcas by the side of our modern 
women, and the apostle Paul by the side of our modern men, 
the contrast would not be so striking. 

We have made tremendous advance in our discoveries 
and inventions, but have not made much in folks. About 
the only realm of which we can think that man has not 
made a serious effort to master is the realm of self. Not 
until our day has man's attention been turned seriously to 



20 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

the scientific development of the race or the improvement 
of the human species. 

Luther Burbank, by taking advantage of well-known 
biological laws, produces thousands of varieties of new 
plants in a single lifetime. Man has taken the crude wild 
dog and by selective processes developed such varieties as 
the mastiff, the St. Bernard, the Newfoundland, the grey- 
hound, the setter, pointer, collie, beagle, poodle, pug, hound, 
Eskimo, terrier, spitz, etc. He has produced at will dogs for 
drawing loads, dogs for running, dogs for fighting, dogs for 
scenting, or dogs for mere playthings. He has taken the 
wild horse, and by employing well-known biological laws 
has produced such varieties as the Percheron, Belgian, 
Arabian, Clydesdale, Suffolk, Shetland, etc. He has made 
at will horses for drawing loads, horses for running, horses 
for trotting, horses for pacing, or tiny playthings for his 
children. 

He has done quite as much in the vegetable kingdom. He 
has developed the wild rose hip into the Ben Davis, the 
Northern Spy, and the Golden Pippin apples. He has de- 
veloped the wild poisonous embryonic almond into the Craw- 
ford, the Chinese cling, the Elberta peaches, nectarines, 
prunes, plums, etc. He has developed the wild gourd into 
the Rocky Ford cantaloupe, the Georgia watermelon, and the 
New England pumpkin. He has developed the roots of the 
deadly nightshade into the Irish potato, and the fruit of the 
nightshade into the tomato. Some of us have lived long 
enough to see the last stage of this development. We can 
remember the little red berry of our grandmother's garden 
called the love apple. This has been developed into the 
modern tomato, which is used as food on all our dinner 
tables. He has taken the wild grasses of Asia and devel- 
oped them into wheat, oats, rye, and barley. He has taken 
the wild dog-rose and multiplied its petals and developed it 
into the Porneron, the Jacqueminot, the Bride, the La 
France, and the American Beauty roses. He has taken the 
wild aster and developed it into the chrysanthemum. 

It is a long step forward from the canoe to the Olympic ; 
from the signal fire to the Marconigraph ; from the sled to 



THE DRAG ON MODERN CIVILIZATION 21 

the electric car; from the hot rock to the cooking stove; 
from muscular strength to dynamite ; from hieroglyphics to 
literature. But it does not seem such a long step forward 
from Mineptah and Plato and Aristotle and Julius Csesar to 
Tom Smith, Dick Jones, and Harry Brown. 

We are looking for the line of advance. Is it possible 
that there are forces which are in man's reach which, intel- 
ligently utilized, would bring about as sweeping, far-reach- 
ing, and beneficent changes as any of those which have 
taken place in the past? I think so. I believe that it is 
quite possible, though it may be difficult for us to project 
humanity upon its tenth period. Let me call attention to 
only three things — a discovery, an idea, and a method — 
which I believe are now either working or can be made to 
work toward the advance of which I speak. 

First, a discovery. I refer to flying machines. I look 
upon them as of such importance that they may be char- 
acterized as world-revolutionizing. One of the greatest 
economic burdens upon the nations of the world to-day is 
that produced by war. The United States, Europe, and 
Japan are expending each year fifteen hundred million dol- 
lars for war. I shall not be surprised if within ten years 
the science of aeronautics is so nearly perfected that the 
navies of the world will be worthess. They are almost so 
to-day. When one man in a small machine which weighs 
only a few hundred pounds can fly over a warship and drop 
a few pounds of dynamite on it and send it in half a minute 
to the bottom of the sea or to the junk pile, it seems to the 
average taxpayer the height of folly to put a million dollars 
into a dreadnaught. 

The second is an idea. It is not a new idea ; it is as old 
as Jesus of Nazareth, but it is new in the sense that it has 
been reborn in recent times. I refer to humanitarianism, 
the idea of human brotherhood. I speak of this as having 
been reborn in recent years. You will recall that Chief 
Justice Taney, as a side remark, in a decision rendered only 
a half century ago, said that negroes had been regarded in 
America as beings so inferior that they had no rights which 
a white man was bound to respect. Mr. Prichard, the 



22 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

English historian, tells us that at the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century there was a serious discussion in England 
over the propriety of civilized Europeans killing the aborig- 
ines of Australia in order that they might feed their flesh 
to English dogs. There has been a tremendous movement 
manward since those days. Great missionary movements 
have swept around the earth. To-day it would be impossible 
to find a sane man in the United States who would say that 
the poorest negro in darkest Africa or the most depraved 
or superstitious individual in Tibet had no rights which we 
are bound to respect. 

The third thing is the method. I refer to eugenics. 
We have been, and are still, trying to drive the human race 
uphill with the brakes on. Of all the drags upon the human 
race to-day, the heaviest are war and bad germ plasm — the 
reproduction of the unfit. I shall not at this time speak of 
war, but shall call attention to a few facts relating to re- 
production of bad germ plasm. 

First, I would have you note that the burden upon civi- 
lization due to bad breeding is increasing. From 1890 to 
1910 the insane persons in the asylums of the United States 
increased from 74,000 to 250,000, the number of criminals 
increased from 82,000 to 115,000, juvenile delinquents in- 
creased from 15,000 to 23,000, paupers increased from 
73,000 to 85,000, eleemosynary patients increased from 
112,000 to 250,000, institutions for the insane increased 
from 162 to 372. 

Four per cent of our population belong to this class 
of insane, idiots, feeble-minded, etc., and the care of them 
is one of our heaviest economic burdens. We are spending 
every year in the United States $30,000,000 for the main- 
tenance of hospitals and such institutions for the care of 
these dependents. We spend $20,000,000 for insane asylums, 
$20,000,000 for almshouses, $13,000,000 for prisons, $5,- 
000,000 for the feeble-minded, deaf, and blind. The 723,000 
persons of this class cost us yearly nearly $100,000,000. 

What is the remedy? The first thing I would suggest 
is the diffusion of the knowledge of these conditions. Such 
organizations as the Southern Sociological Congress I am 



THE DRAG ON MODERN CIVILIZATION 23 

sure will help by the publication of its proceedings and by 
the reports of its work through the daily newspapers; but 
I believe we shall need to make our instruction far more 
elementary and see that it is more widely diffused than can 
ever be done by such institutions as this Congress. It is a 
matter that must be taken up by all the schools of the State, 
public and private. I am not here to find fault with our 
public school systems — they have done fairly well — but I 
do maintain that it is utterly stupid and inexpressibly fool- 
ish and henceforth will be criminally negligent for us to 
continue year after year to require the boys and girls who 
go into our common schools, public schools, and high schools 
to familiarize themselves with a little of Latin, Greek, 
French, and German, and to insist that no boy or girl can 
be graduated from a college or university without being 
able to demonstrate that the square described on the hypot- 
enuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the 
squares described on the other two sides, while they may 
be absolutely ignorant of the fundamental laws of biology. 
We have gotten into an old rut, which was started in me- 
diaeval days, and still insist that no man is an educated 
man, or has the right to call himself cultured, who has not 
taken a course called "classical" in some college or univer- 
sity. We talk in high phrases about the cultural advantage 
of Greek roots and Latin declensions, and are neglecting 
the basic principles of reproduction. I do not believe that 
any boy or girl should be allowed to pass through the com- 
mon schools of our State without an accurate knowledge of 
the fundamental laws of reproduction. The old bogy of 
immodesty must not frighten us any longer. Not one child 
in a thousand to whom such laws are explained will be un- 
prepared for them. No boy or girl is allowed to pass 
through our high schools without knowing that H2O stands 
for water. I have no complaint to make with that. But I 
do maintain that it is of infinitely more importance that 
they should know that insanity, epilepsy, feeble-mindedness, 
and scrofula are absolutely transmissible from father to 
son, and that if one yokes himself to a companion afflicted 
with any of these diseases he is mathematically certain to 



24 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

reproduce offspring of the same sort if the union produces 
progeny at all. 

The second thing I would suggest is that society and 
the State shall undertake a more vigorous campaign of 
elimination of these diseases than it has ever done. We are 
doing something in that direction, but nothing like as much 
as we ought to do. It is not only necessary that the State 
should withhold a marriage license from this class which 
makes up 4 per cent of our population, but go further and 
see to it that they shall not reproduce. That might be ac- 
complished by the absolute segregation of the sexes from 
the earliest years of maturity; and while other measures, 
some of them surgical, have been suggested, and have been 
legalized in nine of our States, segregation is probably the 
best method. If it should be carried out with scrupulous 
care, this class would practically wholly disappear within 
one generation. 

I wish to call attention to the fact that the specialists 
in insane institutions estimate that at least twenty-five per 
cent of aU. who belong to this dependent class are what we 
know as alcoholics. And yet our cities and States are 
going ahead year after year licensing institutions to make 
dependents. 

Is it not time for us as intelligent men and women 
to apply the fundamental laws of biology to ourselves? Is 
not the direction for future development in the way of 
the elimination of the unfit and the improvement of the 
great racial stock? I firmly believe that if the fundamental 
laws of reproduction are observed we shall find that the 
stage of development which I would call the tenth stage of 
civilization will be as far in advance of that in which we 
now live as our electric age is in advance of the rowboat 
and the ox cart. 



CONTROL OF SOCIAL DISEASES 25 



CONTROL OF SOCIAL DISEASES 

POWHATAN S. SCHENCK, M.D., HEALTH COMMISSIONER, 
NORFOLK, VA. 

That I may not be misunderstood by what I shall say 
later, I should like at the outset to define my position and 
my convictions with regard to the so-called social evil. I 
do not advocate nor recommend segregation, reglementa- 
tion, inspection, medical or otherwise, official recognition, 
or tolerance as a remedy for the social evil or the diseases 
dependent thereon. I believe in one standard of morality 
for men and women alike. I do not believe in a standard 
of morals, nor in the conventionalities of a society that per- 
mits, condones, and winks at the habits of the male prosti- 
tute, who, after all, is responsible for and supports the evil, 
and receives him without censure or question within the 
sacred folds of Church and society, and at the same time 
forever condemns and ostracises the female, who, often in 
her weakness and faith in man, is misled and misguided by 
him who should be her friend and protector. I believe in 
stringent laws and legislation and the enforcement thereof 
against the white slave traffic. I believe in an earnest, hon- 
est, and aggressive campaign of education in the schools 
and in the homes, teaching the physiology of sex and sex 
hygiene, discarding absolutely the cloak of prudery, false 
modesty, mystery, and secrecy regarding these vital ques- 
tions. 

Let the boys and men know that every time they enter a 
house of prostitution they are coquetting with a ghastly 
probability; that they may wreck and ruin their own health, 
and that, if married, or prospective husbands and fathers, 
they may bring dire disaster upon those who are dearest to 
them — their wives and children. Let them know that every 
visit they pay to a brothel is at the expense of their men- 
tality; is paid to a house over the door of which should be 
written, "Incurable insanity may be contracted here." I 



26 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

believe that the full facts and horrors of these things should 
be far-flung, that this "conspiracy of silence" to which their 
growth is largely due should cease. I agree fully with Jane 
Addams that our duty is absolutely clear and simple; that 
it is high time to turn on the light, and that an enlightened 
public and a growing conscience should consider and know 
this ancient evil in all its hideous manifestations and should 
recognize in them the most malignant diseases from which 
humanity suffers, scattering misery, incurable invalidism, 
and death broadcast among the guilty and the innocent 
alike. 

The people should be educated to know and feel that of 
all the vices that afflict society this is unquestionably the 
worst, and to longer tolerate it is a moral affront and an 
utter impossibility. I believe in and advocate the enact- 
ment and enforcement of adequate laws suppressing and 
abolishing all houses of ill fame and declaring all prosti- 
tutes public nuisances and a menace to the public health 
and safety — laws that will put out of commission this moral 
leprosy that is eating into the very vitals of the nation. 

I believe in, and am in full accord and sympathy with, 
the good work now being done by the Church and ministry, 
by social workers and sociological societies, and by all the 
other good people who have the present and future welfare 
of the human race at heart. I believe that all of this work 
is potential for great and everlasting good, and I glory in 
and congratulate the good women who have had and are 
having the courage to publicly take up this great work. 
I believe that in time, through the instrumentalities of the 
agencies mentioned, this "consummation devoutly to be 
wished" will be attained, and I sincerely trust that it will 
be at no very distant day. 

In the meantime, pending the consummation of these 
ends, I believe it is the duty of the medical profession, and 
particularly of the health officer, to throw his energies, his 
skill, and his ability into the breach, and do everything that 
lies in his power for the conservation of the health and 
lives of the people whenever and wherever they are in 
jeopardy, from any cause or source whatsoever. I believe 



CONTROL OF SOCIAL DISEASES 27 

it is the duty of the health officer and the physician to look 
with fearless eyes the situation squarely in the face. He 
must recognize the fact that the people, men, women, and 
children, are being infected day by day with the deadliest 
of diseases, diseases that are filling our asylums with the 
insane, our public institutions with the blind, deaf, and crip- 
pled, our hospitals with the sick, our homes with women 
condemned to lifelong invalidism, and with feeble-minded 
children. These diseases are filling our jails and peniten- 
tiaries with criminals and our cemeteries with the prema- 
turely dead. 

It is high time, I say, that, while waiting for the moral 
correction and abolition of this great evil, we should do 
what we can for the physical, that we should hear and 
heed the groans and agony of the afflicted, and make, at 
least, an honest endeavor to lift this burden of disease from 
suffering humanity. I reiterate that I do not offer regie- 
mentation, segregation, and inspection as a remedy for the 
social evil ; but I do recognize that the twin evils of syphilis 
and gonorrhea stand forth to-day as the archenemy of man- 
kind, and I do realize and believe it to be as much my duty 
as a health conservator to attack this enemy of my people 
as it is to attack any other class of diseases that are de- 
stroying those who have a right to and are looking to me 
for protection. I believe it is just as plainly the duty of 
the Health Department to ferret out, quarantine, and treat 
these diseases as it is to look for smallpox, leprosy, or 
plague; for we are all agreed that if social diseases could 
be eliminated, one-half of the misery and suffering of hu- 
manity would go with them. 

So strenuously has this subject been tabooed by society 
in the past that the mere mention of prostitution and vene- 
real diseases has been quite enough to stigmatize the speaker 
with immodesty. Thanks to a broader, more liberal, and 
saner education of the people, we can now approach and 
discuss these vital questions without shocking the conven- 
tionalities or putting to flight the modesty of our audience. 
Owing to this reticence and secrecy on the part of the pub- 
lic health workers and speakers, only a very small minority 



28 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

of the people realize to what extent the human family is 
suffering from these diseases. There has been, and is, a 
woeful lack of knowledge, particularly among young men 
and women, concerning sex and sexual physiology, path- 
ology, and hygiene. The first field in this great work is 
education. Educate the young, not only as to disease con- 
ditions, but as to matters' of sexual hygiene. Let the fathers 
and the mothers get the necessary information, if they 
do not already know it, and impart it and impress it upon 
the children; the fathers upon the boys and the mothers 
upon the girls. Do not let any feelings of prudery or false 
modesty interfere with this imperative duty. The children 
will respect and profit by your information and instruction. 
They will get this information anyway. If you fail to give 
it to them, they will get it from other sources under very 
different circumstances, perhaps when it is too late. Take 
the boys and girls into your confidence. Teach them mat- 
ters of sex hygiene. Do not make a mystery of these vital 
things. They have a right to know. Then teach them the 
horrors of the great red plague. 

Now is the auspicious time, when the tide is strong in 
the direction of disseminating knowledge along other 
branches of medicine and public health work, to bring home 
to the family and people generally these truths. However 
great and profitable in the saving of life and the minimiz- 
ing of suffering the work against other communicable dis- 
eases has been and will be, a still greater benefit may be 
conferred upon humanity by a well-directed, earnest cru- 
sade against the twin evils, the red plague of syphilis and 
gonorrhea, which are dragging thousands upon thousands 
through a miserable existence of disease and shame. 

It is estimated that 50 per cent of the insanity of the 
world is due to syphilis. It is held by high authorities that 
paresis, general paralysis, softening of the brain, always 
ending in insanity, unless death ensues too quickly, are 
always due to this cause. This condition is simply one of 
the terminal stages of the disease. There were over 200,000 
insane persons in the insane asylums of the United States 
last year, 100,000 of them due to these diseases. This num- 



CONTROL OF SOCIAL DISEASES 29 

ber exceeds the combined enlisted strength of the United 
States Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. It exceeds the 
number of students in all of our colleges and universities 
combined. The insane population of our country is in- 
creasing at the rate of over 6,000 each year. There are 
nearly 50,000 people committed to insane asylums each year 
in this country. It costs over $40,000,000 a year to care 
for them. If you add to this stupendous sum the economic 
loss by reason' of the cases, you will find that insanity costs 
the nation $175,000,000 a year, one-half of which is directly 
due to the social evil on account of syphilitic insanity alone. 
The economic loss to the government and public on account 
of insanity is greater than the total expense of the public 
school system of the country. 

Ninety-five per cent of the blindness of children is due to 
social diseases, particularly of gonorrheal ophthalmia ne- 
onatorum. 

It is believed, since we are better able to diagnose old 
cases by the Wasserman and other tests, that all cases of 
locomotor ataxia and of apoplexy occurring in subjects un- 
der fifty years of age are due to syphilis. 

It is estimated that 250,000 cases of venereal diseases 
occur in New York each year. A very large percentage of 
the diseases of the eye, ear, nose, and throat are due to these 
diseases. 

Many thousands of cases of diseases of the viscera, the 
causes of which, though suspected, were not definitely 
known until the Wasserman test came into practice, are 
now known to be of syphilitic origin. A large percentage 
of the diseases of the cardio-vascular system, 75 per cent 
of certain forms of diseases of the heart, diseases of the 
arteries, and aneurisms are due to syphilis. 

A large percentage of tuberculosis is due either to in- 
herited or acquired syphilis, which, by breaking down the 
resisting force of the individual, thereby makes him more 
susceptible to the ravages of the tubercle bacillus. It can 
now be shown that a great many of the cases of bone and 
joint diseases are due to this cause. 

A large percentage of cases of cirrhosis of the liver, 



30 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

certain types of neurasthenia, and brain diseases generally 
are due to syphilis. 

Among the diseases peculiar to women, hospital and 
other statistics show that about 60 per cent of all of the 
cases treated in the various hospitals are due to venereal 
diseases; 80 per cent of all women who die from inflam- 
matory pelvic diseases are victims of these diseases. 

About 60 per cent of all operations performed upon 
women for pelvic diseases are due to social diseases, almost 
all of them ignorantly and innocently contracted by the 
women from their husbands. 

It is conservatively estimated that 80 per cent of all 
men are victims to these diseases at some time during 
their career. Any practicing physician will tell you that 
in investigating and formulating a history of cases coming 
to him for treatment, it is exceedingly rare to find a man 
who has not been infected. 

Seventy-five per cent of childless marriages are due to 
this cause, contracted innocently and unsuspectingly. 

Eighty-five per cent of children born with syphilis and 
gonorrhea are either dead at birth, die very soon after 
birth, or are feeble-minded, blind, or crippled for life. 

There are 35,000 girls drawn from New York each year 
to recruit the ranks in immoral resorts. It is believed by 
authorities and experts that every woman leading this life 
becomes infected sooner or later, usually very soon. 

About 140,000 sick days were lost to the United States 
Navy last year on account of these diseases among the 
sailors; of the total enlistment for 1911, there were about 
9,000 cases of this kind. 

The cost of venereal diseases to the British Army each 
year is estimated at $300,000,000, and there are 60,000 ad- 
missions to the hospitals each year from this cause. 

In the Geneva Training School, at Geneva, 111., at the 
State Reformatory for Women, out of a total commitment 
each year of over two hundred, 60 per cent of them are 
infected with these diseases at the time of their admission. 

One-seventh of the total fighting strength of the army 



CONTROL OF SOCIAL DISEASES 31 

and navy is incapacitated for duty for a greater or less time 
each year by these diseases. 

These figures will show you how relentlessly this moral 
leprosy, this social cancer, is vitiating the manhood and 
womanhood of our country. These diseases have scourged 
humanity since history began, and they are preventable. 

Every member of the social organism is vitally inter- 
ested, whether he wants to be or not. You may be more 
vitally interested than you think. 

Now, what are we going to do about it? The lives and 
health of men, women, and children hang in the balance. 
The dread weight and burden of these diseases has fallen 
pitilessly upon us for ages. No private, foolish, or selfish 
purpose must longer divert us from our duty. 

The Health Department of Norfolk is making an honest 
effort to relieve and mitigate these conditions. While wait- 
ing for the other agencies, already mentioned, to relieve 
the situation as far as the so-called social evil is concerned, 
we are facing and fighting the results of the evil from a 
disease-producing point of view as health officers and sani- 
tarians. 

The Norfolk Health Department, so far as I know, is 
the pioneer in this country in making a persistent and sys- 
tematic effort to control venereal diseases. I mean by this 
that we are the pioneers in making at least the effort to 
control these diseases — not in a perfunctory, half-hearted, 
timid, or apologetic way, but we are making a systematic, 
aggressive warfare and an earnest effort to control venereal 
diseases along the same lines that we fight smallpox, diph- 
theria, and other infectious and contagious diseases, and 
for identically the same reason — namely, the protection of 
the health and lives of the people. 

In order to do this we have formulated certain rules 
and regulations governing this work, which rules carry 
penalties for violations, and we enforce them. 

In the first place, we require registration, together with 
a full and complete description of the inmate — age, color, 
weight, married or single, how long the party has led her 
present life, correct name when we can get it, and the name 



32 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

and address of nearest relative, etc. All of this informa- 
tion is on file in the Health Department. 

We require the "landlady" to report within twenty-four 
hours the arrival or departure of any inmate, together 
with the description and history mentioned above, on printed 
blanks furnished her. 

No new arrival is permitted, under penalty, to ply her 
"vocation" until she has been visited by a medical inspector 
from the department. We have four qualified physicians 
and one police officer assigned to this work. These physi- 
cians and officer regularly inspect each inmate in the city 
every fourteen days. Upon receiving a report of a new 
arrival in any of these houses the examining physicians and 
police officer visit the party. These officers investigate the 
history of the girl, and an attempt is made to induce her 
to return home, if she has recently left home or can go back. 
Failing in this, an attempt is made to induce her to make 
an effort to get employment in some other direction. This 
is left to the tact and judgment of the officers. If nothing 
can be done along these lines (and we have reclaimed 
many), a painstaking, thorough, and scientific examination 
is made, physical and mental. We frequently find these 
girls far deficient mentally, quite a number being of a 
pronounced moron* type. If we find the girl deficient men- 
tally, or under the age of sixteen, and we fail to get her to 
return to her home, we then put her in an institution. If 
the person has an infectious or contagious disease of any 
kind — tuberculosis, communicable skin, eye, venereal, or 
other disease — we do not permit her to engage in the "traf- 
fic" for which she is there. Examinations and inspections 
along these lines are made not only of the new arrivals, 
but of all women of this class, every fourteen days. If 
they are diseased, we send them to the hospitals, or quar- 
antine and treat them until they are pronounced cured. 
That focus of infection is immediately broken up. Occa- 
sionally we find them incorrigible and unruly, addicted to 
whisky and drugs. We then confine them in the city jail 



*A moron is a feeble-minded person, of whatever physical age, hav- 
ing a mental age of between eight and twelve. 



CONTROL OF SOCIAL DISEASES 33 

hospital and put them under treatment not only for the 
disease but for the drug and liquor habit also, but only 
those cases that we cannot handle through the other chan- 
nels mentioned. 

We hold the "landlady" jointly responsible with the in- 
mates for all infractions of the rules and regulations. If 
they break quarantine, fail or refuse to abide strictly by 
the rules, we arrest and punish them, otherwise we treat 
them as kindly and considerately as we do other people. 
Reports are made daily to health department headquarters 
of every infected case, together with a complete history and 
disposition of the case, and the patronizing public is warned 
of the existence of the infection, by a method which we 
have worked out in the department. While it is not ideal 
and perfect, it serves the purpose fairly well. When we 
have a complaint made to the department, either by an in- 
fected person or his physician, we immediately send one of 
the examining physicians and an officer and investigate 
the complaint fully and treat the case according to de- 
velopments. 

Now under this system of medical inspection and ex- 
amination we have detected, since the work began, about a 
year and a half ago, over six hundred cases of syphilis, 
gonorrhea, and other venereal diseases, and several hun- 
dred cases of other forms of communicable diseases. These 
foci of infection would certainly have been responsible for 
many thousands of cases. Many of them would have found 
their way into the homes, carrying diseases, chronic inva- 
lidism, and often death to innocent women and children. If 
the transgressor were the only sufferer, "perhaps we could 
afford to pass the matter by ; but so often his suffering is the 
least, and the innocent women and children, even to the 
second and third generation, have to bear the burden of 
his sin. 

Now some observers say that they are opposed to any 
system of reglementation or inspection because: 

1. We do not reach or diagnose all the cases. 

2. It increases immorality by throwing around these 
people the safeguard of inspection. 

—3 



34 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

3. It increases prostitution, because the patronage is 
greater on account of the inspection. 

Now, I am going to answer these objections frankly, 
honestly, and sincerely as to conditions in Norfolk as a 
result of the work. 

The first objection, that we do not reach nor diagnose all 
of the cases, has no weight as an argument at all, and is 
hardly worth notice. We do not diagnose nor get rid of 
all of the cases of any infectious or contagious disease, 
but every one that we do detect and destroy is that much 
good done. 

The second objection, that inspection increases immoral- 
ity, is not in my opinion true, because the people who 
patronize these places are not to be deterred by fear of 
infection. They will, and do, take the chance; but the 
answer to this will be covered by the reply to the third 
objection, that it increases prostitution. This certainly 
has not been true in Norfolk. On the contrary, it has 
reduced the business nearly 50 per cent, as the official 
figures of the department will show. When we first put 
in our registration we had registered in Norfolk over 700 
of these women. This number has steadily and persistent- 
ly decreased month by month, until, at the new complete 
reregistration in February, we had less than 400. Why? 
Because this class of people do not like to be under the 
official noses of any department, they do not like to be 
held responsible. They do not like the rigid supervision 
and demands of the health department, and they go where 
they can ply their trade without molestation or supervision. 
That has been our experience in Norfolk. Nor do they 
leave these houses and practice prostitution clandestinely. 
We follow them up very closely. They usually leave the 
city. 

We frequently, almost daily, get a report from a "land- 
lady" that she has a new arrival. She tells her what the 
Health Department's requirements are, and when our in- 
spector goes there, he is told that the party had returned 
from whence she came, saying that if she had to go through 



CONTROL OF SOCIAL DISEASES 35 

all the requirements of the Health Department she would 
not stay in Norfolk. 

Now, it is my opinion that, since this is true in Norfolk, 
the same would hold good elsewhere. It therefore reduces 
prostitution — at least it has done so in Norfolk. 

We have reduced the number of prostitutes nearly 50 
per cent, and we have reduced the average number of 
infections from these diseases 80 per cent, as I am pre- 
pared to show by data and statistics on file in my office 
and at the United States Navy reservations at Norfolk. 

At the training and recruiting stations of the United 
States Navy at Norfolk there are on an average about 3,000 
men, including marines. The medical department at these 
stations keeps in close touch with these men in every way. 
They are granted shore leave from time to time, and they 
all come to Norfolk. Before this work began they had 
an average of about 200 cases of venereal infections at all 
times; their average now is less than 10. These are the 
official figures of the medical staff at these stations and are 
accurate and reliable. I report daily to the stations every 
case of infection that we find, giving name, address, and 
character of disease. This is posted on the bulletin at the 
station and the men are warned not to go there. The navy 
medical men in turn give me the names of their infected 
men and they do not allow them to come ashore and spread 
the infection. So the work cuts both ways. 

Now, I am assuming, inasmuch as we cannot get accu- 
rate data from citizens generally, that if the men from 
the navy and marine service are not being infected as they 
were formerly, and the infection comes from the same 
source, it is safe to assume that the balance of the patroniz- 
ing public is being protected at the same rate. Besides, 
the practicing physicians assure me that they treat less than 
half as many cases as they did before we put into operation 
this work. Another thing that we have observed very 
strikingly is that nearly all of the infection that we get 
now (about 80 per cent) is among the new arrivals com- 
ing from cities where there is no inspection or supervision. 

While the warfare in the past against prostitution has 



36 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

been futile, it is impossible to conceive of a greater blessing 
or boon to humanity than its suppression and elimination. 
The public — men, women, and children, and children yet 
unborn — should and ought to be protected. Against the 
great red plague of venereal diseases there is no natural 
immunity — all are susceptible if exposed. While I am heart 
and soul in full accord with any and all movements to sup- 
press and eliminate prostitution and the social evil and 
the diseases consequent thereto, I do maintain that the 
system of inspection and treatment as exercised at Nor- 
folk is potential for great good in the detection and elimi- 
nation of these diseases. It has not increased either pros- 
titution or immorality. On the contrary, by a rigid system 
of surveillance, it has decreased both and at the same 
time reduced in our community venereal diseases at least 
80 per cent. The system as practiced in Norfolk does not 
encourage prostitution, nor throw around a patronizing 
public any feeling or sense of false security, inasmuch as 
we make no attempt whatever to guarantee to the public 
the absence of infection in the segregated district as a 
result of our inspection. On the contrary, we do every- 
thing that we can to discourage any such feeling of safety, 
and constantly preach the great danger and the impos- 
sibility in many instances of detecting these foci of infec- 
tion. We guarantee the public nothing but trouble if they 
will persist in these practices. Pending the final elimina- 
tion of the social evil, we simply try, as conservators of the 
public health, to locate, quarantine, treat, and put out of 
commission these diseases exactly in the same manner 
and for identically the same reasons that we go after small- 
pox or any other infectious diseases that are a constant 
danger and menace to the lives and health of the people 
whom it is our duty to protect. 



THE NEGRO WORKING OUT HIS OWN SALVATION 37 



THE NEGRO WORKING OUT HIS OWN SALVATION 

PROFESSOR E. C. BRANSON, A.M., PRESIDENT STATE NORMAL 
SCHOOL, ATHENS, GA. 

NEGRO FARM OWNERSHIP : THE FACTS AND THEIR 
SIGNIFICANCE 

/. The Facts 

1. At present the drift of negro population in the South 
is distinctly country ward. 

During the last census period our negro population in 
general increased barely 10 per cent, but our negro farm 
population increased more than 20 per cent. Just the re- 
verse tendency is true among the whites of every Southern 
State except Kentucky. 

In 1910 in the South the ratio of negro farm workers 
runs far ahead of negro population in general. For in- 
stance, in South Carolina the negroes are 55 per cent of the 
population, but 68 per cent of the farm workers. In Geor- 
gia they are 45 per cent of the population, but 53 per cent 
of the farm workers ; in Alabama 42 per cent of the popu- 
lation, but 54 per cent of the farm workers; in Louisiana 
43 per cent of the population, but 64 per cent of the farm 
workers; in Mississippi 66 per cent of the population, but 
69 per cent of the farm workers. The negroes are 30 per 
cent of our Southern population, but they are 40 per cent 
of all the persons engaged in agricultural pursuits. 

In Mississippi during the last census period negro farm- 
ers increased at a rate nearly two and a half times greater 
than the rate of increase for negro population in general, 
and in Georgia at a rate nearly three and a half times 
greater. 

In every State of the South except Arkansas and Okla- 
homa the negro is a dwindling ratio of population in gen- 
eral, but he is an increasing ratio of population in the farm 
regions, Louisiana alone excepted. 



38 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

2. On the other hand, the negro is a decreasing ratio 
of population in the cities of the South. 

In 1900 thirty-three Southern cities, each containing 
twenty-five thousand or more inhabitants, had a negro pop- 
ulation amounting to 10 per cent or more. During the 
following census period in all of these cities, except Fort 
Worth, negro population lagged behind the rates of white 
increase — in some of them far behind; as, for instance, in 
Atlanta and Macon. In others there was an actual loss of 
negro population. 

Between 1865 and 1880 the towns and cities of the 
South seemed in fair way of being overrun and overwhelmed 
by the negroes. In 1910 it becomes evident that the negro 
is resisting the lure of city life and sticking to the farm 
better than the Southern white man. 

Some fifty thousand negroes are engaged in the various 
professions, mainly teaching, preaching, medicine, and law ; 
some thirty thousand more are engaged in various business 
enterprises — some of them with conspicuous success and 
distinction. But here, all told, are fewer than a hundred 
thousand upward-moving negroes. 

On the other hand, two and a third million negroes are 
engaged in agricultural pursuits as day laborers, tenants, 
and owners. With their families, they represent more than 
four-fifths of their race in the South, and they cultivate a 
hundred million acres of our farm land, or two-thirds of 
our total improved acreage. 

3. The negro, then, is wisely choosing or blindly mov- 
ing to work out his own salvation as a race, not in city but 
in country civilization. 

In the farm regions he is achieving a new economic 
status. He is rapidly rising out of farm tenancy into farm 
ownership. In a large way he is coming to be a landed 
proprietor. During their first twenty years of freedom the 
negroes made little headway in land ownership. They were 
absorbed either in politics or in religion, and this is par- 
ticularly true of the leaders. The constructive achievements 
of the race were most marked in the direction of church- 
building and church organizations. 



THE NEGRO WORKING OUT HIS OWN SALVATION 39 

But during the last thirty years the negroes of the South 
have come to feel that bank books and barns are more im- 
portant than ballot boxes. At all events they appear in the 
1910 census not as farm workers or farm tenants merely, 
but as farm owners in large numbers. 

Nearly one-fourth of all the negro farmers in the South 
own the farms they cultivate. In Florida they own nearly 
one-half of them, in Kentucky and Oklahoma more than 
one-half of them, in Maryland and Virginia more than three- 
fifths of them, and in West Virginia nearly four-fifths 
of them. In less than fifty years the negro has ac- 
quired possession of twenty million acres of farm land. 
Altogether his farm properties are valued at nearly $500,- 
000,000. Negro landholdings in the aggregate make an 
area a little larger than the State of South Carolina. The 
Russian serfs, after fifty years of freedom, have not made 
greater headway. They have not done so well indeed in 
their conquest of illiteracy. 

True, cropping and share tenancy are increasing in the 
South faster than cash or standing-rent tenancy with its 
larger measure of independent self-direction — nearly seven 
times as fast during the last census period. But wherever 
land is abundant or labor scarce or white farmers are mov- 
ing out, the negro rapidly rises out of share tenancy into 
cash tenancy and even more rapidly out of cash tenancy into 
ownership. 

During the last census period the negroes of the South 
increased less than 10 per cent in population, but they in- 
creased 17 per cent in the ownership of farms against a 12 
per cent increase of white farm owners. In Mississippi, 
Alabama, and North Carolina the farms cultivated by white 
owners increased only 9 per cent, but the farms cultivated 
by negro owners increased 19, 21, and 22 per cent in the 
order named. In Arkansas, while white farm owners in- 
creased 8 per cent, negro farm owners increased nearly 23 
per cent. In Georgia the white farm owners increased 
only 7 per cent, but negro farm owners increased 38 per 
cent. Even in Louisiana, where there was an actual loss of 



40 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

negro farm population, there was an increase of 14 per cent 
in the number of negro farm owners. 

In 283 counties, or nearly one-third of all the counties 
of ten Southern States, the negroes are in a majority. In 
sixty-one of these counties negro farm owners outnumber 
the white farm owners. This is true of five counties in 
Georgia, six in Oklahoma, eight in Arkansas, eleven in 
Mississippi, and seventeen in Virginia. 

The negro farmer now owns $37,000,000 worth of farm 
implements and tools, $177,000,000 worth of farm animals, 
$273,000,000 worth of farm lands and buildings. During 
the last ten years he has nearly doubled his wealth in farm 
implements, more than doubled his wealth in farm animals, 
and nearly trebled his wealth in farm land and buildings. 

In Georgia, in 1910, the farms cultivated by white own- 
ers numbered 82,930, an increase of 5,776, or 7 per cent 
during the ten years. The farms cultivated by negro own- 
ers numbered 15,700, an increase of 4,324, or 38 per cent 
during this period. The rate of negro increase in farm 
ownership in Georgia is more than five times the rate of 
white increase during the last census period. 

In 1880 Georgia negroes owned 580,664 acres of farm 
land, but in 1910 they owned 1,607,970 acres. It is nearly 
a threefold increase during the thirty years. Negro prop- 
erty upon the tax digests of Georgia now amounts to $34,- 
000,000. Three-fourths of it is country property. Their 
gains in property ownership in the rural regions of Georgia 
are amazing, but they appear so uniformly on our tax 
digests that they have ceased to be surprising. 

Here, for instance, is one of the sixty-six counties in the 
black horseshoe belt of the State. The negroes outnumber 
the whites more than four to one. In 1910 they owned near- 
ly one-tenth of all the farm land, nearly one-third of the 
plantation and mechanical tools, more than one-third of all 
the household goods and utensils, nearly one-half of all 
the farm animals, and one-sixth of the total aggregate 
wealth of the county. 

In another county there are 1,148 negro farm owners. 
They outnumber the white farm owners nearly three to one. 



THE NEGRO WORKING OUT HIS OWN SALVATION 41 

In the census year only twelve mortgages were recorded 
against the negro farms of this county. 

In an adjoining county four-fifths of all the farms 
cult vated by owners are cultivated by negro owners. In the 
census year there were no mortgages whatsoever on negro 
farms in this county. 

In my own county in 1910 they owned 8,283 acres of 
land; in one district more than one-fourth and in another 
nearly one-third of all the farm land. In all, 957 negroes 
in the county, or more than one in every three males of 
voting age, are home or farm owners. 

Where they are thinly scattered among white majori- 
ties, they make even more astonishing gains. For instance, 
here is a county in which the negroes own 15,146 acres of 
land. Their gain in the ownership of farm animals in ten 
years was 291 per cent; in plantation and mechanical tools, 
497 per cent; and in aggregate wealth, 310 per cent. 

In the white belt is another county where the whites 
outnumber the negroes nearly two to one. But the gain 
by negroes in the ownership of plantation and mechanical 
tools during the census period was 376 per cent; in farm 
animals, 226 per cent; in total aggregate wealth, 230 per 
cent. 

77. Their Significance 

Here then in brief are the facts concerning negro farm 
and home ownership in the South. They show that the 
negro is a dwindling ratio of population in every Southern 
State except Arkansas and Oklahoma ; that he is a decreas- 
ing ratio of population in the cities of the South; but that 
he is an increasing ratio of population in the farm regions 
of every Southern State except Louisiana. They show in 
every Southern State without exception that the negroes 
are increasing in farm ownership at a greater rate than the 
whites ; indeed, at rates varying all the way from two and a 
half to five and a half times the rates of white increase in 
farm ownership. Of course their farm holdings are small 
and their total acreage relatively little ; but assuredly they 
are getting what Uncle Remus calls a "toe-holt" in the soil. 



42 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

1. The Negro Works Out His Own Salvation Under 
Racial Law. — The Southern negro, then, is working out his 
own salvation, not in terms of politics, not in terms of 
formal education, but in terms of property ownership; and 
mainly in terms of land in the rural regions. He is doing 
this without let or hindrance in the South, largely aside 
from the awareness of the whites, largely because of their 
indifference, but even more largely with the sympathy and 
help of his white friends and neighbors. He is lifting him- 
self up by tugging at his own boot straps, a figure commonly 
used to indicate an impossible something; but in civilization, 
as in education, it is the only possible means of elevation. 

The negro is emerging from jungleism and winning civi- 
lization mainly and necessarily by his own efforts. He is 
coming out of darkness into light in accord with and in obe- 
dience to the laws of development. His progress every inch 
of the way is marked by struggle — struggle within himself 
for mastery over himself, and struggle with outward, un- 
toward surrounding circumstances. 

His real successes are achieved by himself. They can- 
not be thrust upon him by another. He cannot be coddled 
into civilization by an overplus of sympathy from friends 
far or near, North or South. We have tried to civilize the 
Indian with reservations and free rations, and we have 
failed. 

The negro as a race will never stand really possessed 
of anything that he does not win worthily by himself and 
for himself. His gains in property ownership, position, in- 
fluence, and prominence in economic and civic freedom 
will keep steady pace with racial efficiency. His destiny 
will be wrought out in terms biologic, economic, and social ; 
and, as usual, in dumb, blind struggle for self-defensive ad- 
justment to surrounding conditions. 

2. The Laws of Racial Development have something like 
the steady, fateful pull and power of gravitation or any 
other natural law. These laws can be discovered and ma- 
nipulated to accelerate or retard progress, just as all the 
laws of nature can be discovered and harnessed for con- 
structive or destructive purposes. They can be recognized 



THE NEGRO WORKING OUT HIS OWN SALVATION 43 

and applied as the laws of electricity have been recognized 
and applied. They cannot be invented and willed into 
operation by individual bumptiousness or legislative blind- 
ness. 

The negro problem will not be solved by editorials, 
screeds, or statutes; by conferences, congresses, or assem- 
blies; by pride, prejudice, or passion. 

The development of the negro can be stimulated, safe- 
guarded, and directed wisely and beneficently. The asperi- 
ties of natural law can be softened. The stream of tenden- 
cies can be kept clear of injustice and cruelty, brutality and 
inhumanity; and it will be so if we have any Christianity 
worth the name. 

3. His Chance Is in the Country. — The way of salvation 
for the negro is not along the paved highways of city civili- 
zation. 

Whether or not there be any definite racial recognition 
of this fact, it is nevertheless true that during the last 
census period there was a steady drift of negroes out of 
Southern cities into farm regions. 

The modern city is everywhere a challenge to the civili- 
zation of any people, black or white. Under urban condi- 
tions the breath of man seems to be fatal to his fellows, 
but most of all fatal to the negro. Here he finds the strug- 
gle for # existence fiercest. Here the forces of life most 
rapidly eliminate the weak and unfit. Here physical and 
moral diseases most rapidly work destructive results upon 
the race. 

The death rate of negroes decreased during the last cen- 
sus period, but in the registration area it is still 60 per 
cent higher than the death rate of the whites; 66 per cent 
higher in Atlanta and Richmond, 77 per cent higher in 
Birmingham and Baltimore, 89 per cent higher in New 
Orleans, and 107 per cent higher in Charleston. In only 
one city of America, San Antonio, Tex., is the death rate 
of negroes lower than the death rate of whites. 

In Washington City the death rate of negro infants from 
all diseases is from two and a half to nearly four times 
that of white infants ; while the death rate of negro infants 



44 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

from tuberculosis is nearly four and a half times the death 
rate of white infants from this disease. 

This disproportionate death rate among negroes is not 
entirely explainable in terms of race alone. They herd in 
slums in the cities North and South because they are poor. 
As a rule, sanitary conditions in these slums beggar descrip- 
tion. 

4. He Wages a Losing Battle in the Cities. — But also in 
the cities, North and South alike, there is a decreasing range 
and variety of industrial opportunities for the negro. 

The barber shops, the shoe-shine parlors, the shoe-mend- 
ing shops, the delivery and sale of newspapers, the waiting 
in hotels and restaurants, and even domestic service in the 
homes are steadily passing out of the hands of the city negro 
everywhere. The same thing is true of the building and 
repair trades of all sorts. He may be serving his own race 
more in these capacities, but he is certainly everywhere 
serving the white race less. 

In the cities the negro as a race is waging a losing bat- 
tle. The ravages of drink and drug evils, the vices and 
diseases of the slums make swift and certain inroads upon 
the race as a whole in congested centers of population. 

5. The Battle of Standards. — It would be beyond reason 
to expect a belated people in any large racial way to suc- 
ceed upon the highest levels of competition. His chances 
of progress are upon the lower levels, where life is less 
intense, the struggle for existence less desperate, and sur- 
rounding circumstances more propitious and helpful. 

The negro's chance is the countryside. Here he suc- 
ceeds and achieves a new economic status for the race. 

It is everywhere true that lower standards of living 
prevail over and gradually displace higher standards of 
living wherever the higher standards are weakened by luxu- 
rious wants and undefended by increasing energy and skill. 
This social law is operative in the lower rounds of industry 
as well as in the simple life of the farm regions. The for- 
eigner, for instance, displaces the native whites in the mills 
and on the farms of New England. In the South the im- 



THE NEGRO WORKING OUT HIS OWN SALVATION 45 

mense gains of the negro in farm ownership is an apt 
illustration of this law. 

6. He Wages a Winning Battle in the Farm Regions. — 
The open country needs him as a farm worker. It holds out 
beckoning hands to him. The countryside has no slums. 
Fresh air, unmixed sunshine, and pure water are abundant. 
Fuel is everywhere plentiful. Nobody ever heard of a coun- 
try negro's freezing or starving to death or even suffering 
for the necessities of life in the rural South. In the country 
there are fewer temptations to irregularities of living. He 
sleeps more and works harder. He is less tempted into dissi- 
pation and vice. His home life is cleaner and wholesomer. 
His children are closer to him and under better oversight. 
Family life is less apt to be disrupted by immoralities or 
desertion. He easily saves money and gets ahead in the 
world somewhat. The negro is waging a winning battle in 
the farm regions. He may be destined for the present to 
lose out everywhere else, but he is rising into a new eco- 
nomic level in the open country. 

7. His Civilization Begins in the Home-Owning Instinct. 
— Negro civilization begins, then, as all other civilizations 
have begun — in the home-owning, home-loving, home-de- 
fending instinct, in the pride, the industry, the thrift, and 
the sense of law and order that are peculiarly bred in people 
by land ownership. It is difficult to civilize a landless, home- 
less people; sojourners, pilgrims, and strangers in the land, 
foot-loose and free to wander at sweet will and pleasure; 
without abiding interest in the schools and Churches of the 
community, in law and order, peace and progress. 

It is the landless, homeless condition of the people of 
Mexico that makes Mexican civilization such a puzzling, 
baffling problem. The State despairs of civic stability for 
them, and the Church well-nigh despairs of salvation for 
them. Peonage, both economic and spiritual, is their inevi- 
table lot until they have a stake in the land. In the nature 
of things freedom arises out of land ownership. "The land 
is the man," said the early Saxons; "no land, no man." 

There is little hope in any country for vagrant tenants, 
black or white. A little more than a hundred thousand of 



46 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

the negro farmers of Georgia are tenants. Fifty-one per 
cent of them flit every year into new fields and pastures 
green. They drift into the lumber camps, into and out 
of the railway gangs, into the slum quarters of the cities 
and out again. 

Real progress in the civilization of this race lies with 
the home and farm owners. They are tethered by property 
ownership. They are steadied by self-denial, industry, 
thrift, and a sense of personal worth ; and by the same cords 
they are bound to law and order. They develop the qualities 
and virtues of citizenship. They think twice before yield- 
ing to criminal impulse. In home and farm ownership they 
give hostages to society. 

Land ownership sharpens the negro's wits, clarifies his 
vision, and supports his conscience. He becomes an efficient 
moral and social police against the idle and vicious of his 
own race. Widespread land ownership among the negroes 
would cure vagrancy as no legislation can ever do. Every- 
where, among all peoples, patriotism is rooted in the soil 
and is nourished by it. 

8. Loses Faith in Spelling Books; Gains Faith in Pocket- 
books. — It is not without significance that the enrollment 
and attendance of negro children in schools everywhere lag 
behind the enrollment and attendance of white children. 
This is true not only in the South but in the North and West, 
where ample school facilities, long terms, and splendid op- 
portunities are freely open to them. The simple truth is, 
the negro is getting over the first flush of the notion I heard 
voiced ten years ago in my own home by the cook. She 
jumped on her little granddaughter in the shade of the 
back yard, saying, ''You fool nigger, you better study dat 
jogfry lesson eff'n you want to be a lady like Miss Edie." 

He is losing faith in spelling books and gaining faith in 
pocketbooks just as he has lost faith in ballot boxes and 
gained faith in bank accounts. In Georgia barely more 
than two-thirds of the negro children are registered in the 
schools for so much as a single day during the year; and 
only a little more than one-third of them are in average 
attendance. That is to say, practically two-thirds of the 



THE NEGRO WORKING OUT HIS OWN SALVATION 47 

negro children of school age are out of school the year 
round. It is rather to the credit of the negroes that they 
turn indifferently away from the disgraceful negro schools 
in the country regions of the South. 

Dumbly, blindly, and gropingly they are basing their 
progress, not on formal education, but upon the discipline of 
mind and body, disposition and character involved in the 
acquisition of property. Home and farm ownership calls 
for industry, steady and persistent; for self-denial and the 
sense of futurity out of which the capital of the business 
world has always been created. It calls for the prompt 
doing of things that ought to be done whether they want to 
do them or not. It calls for the weighing of remoter, 
greater satisfactions over against the pleasures and satis- 
factions of the moment. It calls for self-propulsion, self- 
compulsion, and severe self-inflicted discipline. 

These are lessons learned only in the school of hard 
experience. They are jewels plucked only from the toad's 
head of adversity. They are developed in a race only by 
struggle upward through long periods of time. Here is 
industrial education that counts. It is education, not in 
languages, but in realities, in the things and affairs of life, 
by the goad of lively ambition or pinching necessity. 

The tree of knowledge is best watered by the sweat of 
labor. Life is subdued by dyeing one's hands in the stuff 
itself. Doing precedes knowing as certainly in civilization 
as in religion. Doing something, having something, know- 
ing something, and being somebody is a necessary order of 
development for individuals and races alike. Knowing 
by doing is a fundamental law of pedagogy. It is also a 
fundamental law of race progress. An illiterate home and 
farm owner is a far more worthful man and citizen and 
really is far better educated than the man who speaks many 
languages and is ignorant in them all. 

9. Black Skins; White Characters. — Out of property 
ownership comes a certain sense of personal worth and 
dignity, and a sure realization of the force and driving 
power of character. One of my earliest recollections con- 
cerns a young coal-black negro in North Carolina winning 



48 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

his spurs in a great speech before a great audience of both 
races. He daringly stood for the right as he saw it, in oppo- 
sition to the overwhelming sentiment of his people. He 
was fighting a great enemy and curse to his race, the drink 
evil. When Price was cut down by untimely death, he was 
laid away with distinguished honors. Four of the pallbear- 
ers were black and four of them were white, the Chief Jus- 
tice of the State among them. 

Upon another occasion I heard the Monday program of a 
Southern Chautauqua publicly adjourned to do honor to a 
negro. The stores of the little city were closed and appar- 
ently everybody, black and white, was in attendance upon 
the funeral. He was a prosperous negro farmer in the 
county, whose account was sought by every merchant in 
the city, whose word was as good as his bond, whose ad- 
vice and counsel to his people were always sane and safe. 
Always he stood as a breakwater against lawlessness and 
disorder of every description. Again the pallbearers were 
both white and black, and Frank Hill was laid away with 
a distinct sense of loss on the part of the entire community. 

10. The Need for Non-Partisan Studies. — Negro farm 
ownership in 283 (or nearly one-third) of the cotton belt 
counties in which the negroes are densely massed is one 
problem. Farm ownership among negroes thinly scattered 
in white counties among white majorities is another prob- 
lem. In one case negro property owners manifestly yield 
to the upward pull of the surrounding superior mass. Here 
they certainly acquire ownership with accelerated rapidity, 
and with advantage to themselves and the community at 
large. In the other case, negro farm owners are thinly 
scattered in black counties among black majorities. Do 
they yield to the downward pull of the surrounding, infe- 
rior mass of shiftless, thriftless negroes? Is negro life 
in these counties slipping back into savagery? 

The answer calls for complete acquaintance with the 
facts. There are now many negro communities that are 
working out their salvation under conditions more or less 
sequestered. In Louisa County, Va., the negroes own 
fifty-three thousand acres of land; in Liberty County, Ga., 



THE NEGRO WORKING OUT HIS OWN SALVATION 49 

fifty-five thousand acres; in Macon County, Ala., sixty-one 
thousand acres. In Beaufort County, S. C, negro farm 
owners outnumber white farm owners seventeen to one. 
Negro civilization in these counties is at hand for inves- 
tigation under a dry light. Mound Bayou, Miss., Boley, 
Okla., Tuskegee, and Greenwood are centers of negro farm 
communities. There is abundant opportunity for direct, 
first-hand study by non-partisan investigators. And there 
is need for race studies by scientific students, in scientific 
ways, and in scientific spirit. 

The negro has suffered from the zeal of retained attor- 
neys for preconceived opinions; almost as much from in- 
discreet friends as from hostile critics. The skies ought to 
be cleared by impersonal, impartial acquaintance with the 
facts, whatever they are, concerning negro problems and 
progress. Many good people in the South stand hesitating- 
ly aloof because they are insufficiently informed and hon- 
estly in doubt about what is really best for the negro and 
the community in which he lives. 

11. Getting Land the Beginning of Economic Wisdom. — 
It seems fairly clear that neither for the negro nor for 
any race is well-being fully determined by physical sur- 
roundings. Being better off does not necessarily mean be- 
ing better. Home and farm ownership by the negroes is 
not the end of the problem, but it seems to be a necessary 
beginning. With all his getting, the negro is getting wis- 
dom enough to get land, and it is at least the beginning of 
economic wisdom and sovereign freedom. 

By virtue of home and land and other property owner- 
ship he is coming to be a civilizable, Christianizable crea- 
ture. Without it his religion would always be an emotional, 
unrelated, unapplied frenzy. With it he stands a chance 
to bridge the gulf between creed and conduct, emotion and 
action. Is he gaining in industry, honesty, law-abidingness 
and comfort ? Yes — to the extent that he is gaining in home 
and farm ownership, and not greatly otherwise. 

Of course he has not always wisely used the opportu- 
nities and privileges of this new-found freedom. Neither 
did our Teuton forefathers in the days that followed the 



50 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

Reformation. Slipping the bridle of the priest, they found 
themselves loose in pagan meadows. They were coltish 
accordingly. The seventeenth century in Protestant Europe 
is a story of unchecked sensuality and rout, vice and vicious- 
ness, lawlessness and crime. Racial self-restraint and self- 
control are not speedily developed in any race, anywhere, 
at any time. 

12. Crumbs of Religious Instruction. — The full signifi- 
cance of such religion as we really have could not have 
been hidden from the negro, nor could he possibly have es- 
caped its influence. Our religion, such as it is, has wrought 
its effect upon him far above and beyond any conscious 
will and effort. The negro has made amazing gains in 
Church activities, religious organization, church-building, 
and church property ownership of all sorts. His white 
friends and neighbors in the South have contributed largely 
to the building and support of negro churches and church 
enterprises. We have given building sites and money — 
constantly, good-naturedly, and more or less indifferently. 
We have laughed good-humoredly at the negro's religion. 
We have told many a joke about its emotional nature and 
its lack of relation to ethical conduct. 

But — and I think I ought to say it — the spiritual well- 
being of the negro has not been a heavy burden of respon- 
sibility upon our souls. Of late years he has had barely 
more than the crumbs of religious instruction that have 
fallen from our tables. For the most part we have left 
to the negro the cure of his own soul. We have not been 
full of heaviness because of his sickness. We have not been 
greatly disturbed because he has been sitting in darkness 
and in the shadow of death. It mav be that after a while 
we shall come to be concerned about the black man's soul. 
We cannot safely exclude from our scheme of ethics or 
religion any creature, dumb or human, black or white, who 
needs our help. We are learning this fundamental lesson — 
slowly. 

13. The Outlook. — Nevertheless it remains always and 
everlastingly true that his destiny lies not in his stars, 
nor in another, but in himself. The negro will work out 



MODERN IDEAS OF ADMINISTRATION 51 

his own salvation, and doubtless in fear and trembling. 
It could not be otherwise. It is a fateful law of life, eco- 
nomic and social, civic and spiritual. 

But Paul writes it to the Philippians with unspeakable 
tenderness. It will be well for both races in the South if 
they be saturated with the spirit of this Epistle. It will be 
ill for both if either misses its meaning. 

The negro problem will be settled upon no plane lower 
than the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. 



MODERN IDEAS OF ADMINISTRATION IN THE 

GOVERNMENT OF WORKHOUSES AND 

PENAL INSTITUTIONS 

W. H. WHITTAKER, WARDEN, OCCOQUAN, VA. 

It is only in recent years that the mass of our people 
have begun to realize that the methods employed in handling 
citizens who are so unfortunate as to be committed to the 
penal and correctional institutions must be humanized. A 
few of our progressive States, as well as the United States 
government, are now working under principles as laid down 
in the indeterminate sentence and parole law that governs 
their penal institutions, a principle that should be followed 
by all the States. 

The mere enactment of laws, however, will not bring 
about the desired results upon any proposition. There 
must be placed in charge of our institutions, after the proper 
laws have been enacted for the foundation upon which to 
work, men and women in all departments who are imbued 
with high ideals and with character so they may stand 
before these untrained, uneducated, often wicked and 
vicious, citizens as examples of everything that stands for 
honor and Christian citizenship, in order that the teachings 
of Him who shapes the destiny of all men miay become the 
foundation for the punishment and reformation of the in- 
mates of such institutions. 

True friendship, love, and a square deal mean much to 



52 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

the class of our unfortunate citizens found in institutions 
erected and dedicated to their treatment; and when this 
principle prevails in such institutions ninety per cent of the 
normal men and boys committed for crimes can be saved to 
society. In the management of such people the word "pun- 
ishment," as used in practically all our institutions, should 
be eliminated. Taking the liberty of an individual by pro- 
cess of law should be the only punishment in a penal or 
reformatory institution. 

The principle that makes the strongest appeal to the 
manhood of a normal subject while confined is the one that 
will bring through his conscience such punishment as will 
be lasting and effective. Here I want to give a few sugges- 
tions that appeal to me as the correct lines along which we 
should work to bring to society and to the unfortunate fel- 
low, who is called a criminal, results which will redound to 
the happiness and credit of both. 

The highest degree of reformation will not be obtained 
in our penal and reformatory institutions unless the industry 
of the normal inmate be such as to train him in a useful 
trade and enable him to better secure useful and remuner- 
ative employment after he has been paroled and discharged. 

Reformation cannot be obtained without training in 
practical farm or shop work and a thorough understanding 
of obedience to law. 

Useful and profitable labor in such institutions is essen- 
tial to the health of body and mind. 

The indeterminate sentence and parole law for work- 
house and reformatory are absolutely necessary if perma- 
nent results are to be accomplished for reformation. 

Workhouse sentences of from fifteen to sixty days, as 
administered by our police courts, breed vagrancy and 
crime. The practice should be eliminated by law, giving the 
police courts power to sentence all cases of vagrancy and 
violators of minor crimes to the workhouse for not less than 
sixty days nor more than two years, with the right of the 
management to parole after sixty days. 

It requires time in any institution to bring to bear upon 
the inmates the necessity of good citizenship ; therefore any 
law that compels the management to discharge the inmate 



MODERN IDEAS OF ADMINISTRATION 53 

after a short period is a detriment not only to the offender 
but to society as well. 

In a reformatory an inmate should serve from three to 
five years in order to receive proper discipline, proper moral 
instruction, proper training in the school of letters, and 
necessary training in shop work before he is permitted to 
return to society. No institution can accomplish the best 
results until it provides the proper means of training its 
officers in their respective duties. This can best be done by 
an officers' school, maintained and managed under the direct 
supervision of the management of the institution. 

Reformation follows the substitution of worthy ideals 
for unworthy ones. Therefore a library of from 3,000 to 
10,000 well-selected books is one of the most potent factors 
in bringing about this substitution. Each inmate should 
be graded in his reading ability and given only such books 
as he is able to comprehend. 

Degenerates, confirmed criminals, rapists, and abnormal 
subjects that constitute 50 per cent of our prison and re- 
formatory population should be kept in prison their natural 
lives, or if released rendered sterile so that further produc- 
tion of their kind should cease. 

I am firmly of the opinion that if we have the above sug- 
gestions incorporated in laws and rules governing our insti- 
tutions, with the proper class of men as officers — men who 
will give the careful thought and study to this question 
which it deserves, who will create in their departments the 
proper environment by giving a square deal, by the use of 
kind words and firm discipline, with the indeterminate sen- 
tence and parole law in all our States administered without 
political pull, so the normal subject can be held a sufficient 
length of time to become proficient in education and, trade — 
there will be absolutely no real punishment in our institu- 
tions in fifty years. 

In my judgment the only punishment the State has a 
right to inflict upon any man is to deprive him of his liberty ; 
and when this is done the more you can make him realize 
his position as a man and a citizen while in the institution, 
the more he will realize that there is a place in society for 



54 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

him to fill as an honorable citizen, and therefore the more 
certain will be his punishment, if we must so term it. 

The greatest menace to-day in handling men and boys 
in our institutions is the law that requires fixed sentences 
by court or jury. A prisoner so sentenced has no regard 
for discipline, for society, or for himself, for he knows that 
no rule of the management can keep him beyond a certain 
date, and in a very great majority of such cases it is impos- 
sible to impress upon such subjects the importance of im- 
proving their time while in prison; while if their term is 
indefinite and their release depends upon their advancement 
in education and trade they at once, on entering the insti- 
tution, begin to improve their condition, physically, men- 
tally, and morally, and at the end of a few years they will 
become new men. With an opportunity of parole, 90 per 
cent of all normal subjects will make good. 

If there is an important time in the life of a man who 
has been convicted and sentenced for crime, it is the day 
he is released from prison. If he is released at the end of a 
fixed sentence, with no thought while he is in the institution 
of his education or moral welfare, with no money or friends, 
with no recommendation from the management, what hope 
is there for him ? Statistics tell us that 75 per cent of such 
fellows follow the life of vagrants or criminals; while, on 
the other hand, from our institutions that have the inde- 
terminate sentence and parole law operated with politics 
eliminated, 90 per cent of all normal subjects return to 
society as self-supporting and honorable citizens. 

The most important question that should be considered 
to-day by Congress and our legislatures is that of revising 
our criminal code, more particularly as administered by 
giving petty offenders short and fixed terms in jail and 
workhouse. The method of placing charges for vagrancy 
and petty crimes against the class of unfortunates that fill 
our jails and workhouses on a fifteen- or thirty-day sentence 
is an injustice that should no longer be tolerated. Such 
proceedings are to-day breeding more vagrancy and crime 
than any environment with which society is afflicted. 

In the jails and workhouses of this country there are 
annually committed on a sentence of not less than fifteen 



MODERN IDEAS OF ADMINISTRATION 55 

days nor more than thirty days more than 200,000 of our 
citizens on charges on which the prisoner should have been 
discharged with a reprimand or a suspended sentence by 
the court. In the District of Columbia alone the short sen- 
tence was given to more than 2,500 people during the past 
year. 

After every effort of the court by reprimand, suspended 
sentence,, etc., has become exhausted and it becomes neces- 
sary to sentence such immoral and troublesome creatures, 
let the sentence be not less than sixty days nor more than 
two years to the workhouse — never to the jail — giving the 
management of the institution ample time to clean them up, 
teach them industry and such training as will cause them 
to take a hopeful view of life, and send them back to society 
useful and respected citizens. 

After reprimand and suspended sentences have failed, 
then we need in our criminal procedure a certainty of con- 
viction. A violator of the law should then be made to 
understand that he will lose his liberty if he transgresses 
on forbidden ground. When every opportunity has been 
given a man and he fails to appreciate it by conducting him- 
self as a law-abiding citizen, then he should be dealt with by 
the courts quickly, and with no chance through technicality 
to evade the training and discipline that will be meted out 
to him on an indefinite sentence in a well-regulated institu- 
tion under trained and expert management. 

On July 1, 1910, the Commissioners of the District of 
Columbia commenced work on 1,150 acres of land near 
Occoquan, Va., that in a few years will redound to the credit 
of those who were pioneers in bringing about the necessary 
legislation for this institution, known as the District of 
Columbia Workhouse, and will, I hope, in a few years be 
known as the District of Columbia Farm. 

On this 1,150 acres of land there have been constructed 
twenty-five buildings, consisting of dormitories, dining- 
rooms, lounging hall, hospital, horse and dairy barn. These 
are all one-story and constructed of wood with a view of 
giving ample light and ventilation. Our plan for the pris- 
oner is that of the concrete or dormitory system, having no 
cells, locks, or bars about the institution. Two hundred 



56 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

prisoners are taken care of during the night in each dormi- 
tory ; and, as we have six hundred male prisoners, this re- 
quires three such buildings. In these dormitories cots are 
arranged side by side on raised platforms, sufficient bedding 
(consisting of mattress, sheets, pillows, blankets, and com- 
forts) being given to each prisoner. All the buildings are 
steam heated and electric lighted and have ample water for 
sewerage purposes. 

During the evening after the day's work is done, and on 
Sundays, the men are taken to a large building known as 
the Rest Hall and Library, where they are permitted to talk, 
play checkers, read the daily newspapers which are brought 
for them by the management, and they have access to the 
library of 3,000 volumes. In summer evenings and on Sun- 
days the inmates are permitted to take the benches out into 
the yard and enjoy the open air. 

In one of the buildings referred to we have a shower 
bath and arrangements where the inmates make their toilets. 
In this building 125 men can be taken care of at one time. 
We have no wash basins, but have a faucet for each man, 
which makes it more sanitary, and the men are also fur- 
nished with individual towels and soap. 

The fact that the prisoners are sent to us on short sen- 
tences, the time now being from fifteen days to one year, 
our average sentence being thirty-five days, makes it very 
necessary and important that the sanitary conditions should 
be closely looked after, as from 10 to 15 per cent of the pris- 
oners sent us, when received, have vermin on their person. 
This, however, is looked after so closely that, though we 
handle from five to six thousand people a year, we are abso- 
lutely free from vermin in any of the twenty-five buildings. 

In working prisoners we give from fifteen to twenty men 
to an officer, whose part it is to direct this number in a 
humane and intelligent manner and to have them under- 
stand that it is our purpose to be helpful. With such meth- 
ods we have very little trouble so far as discipline is con- 
cerned. Work on this 1,150 acres of land consists of build- 
ing roads, constructing buildings, farming, making brick, 
crushing stone, building and repairing wagons, painting 
and whitewashing the buildings, poultry-raising, dairy, etc. 



MODERN IDEAS OF ADMINISTRATION 57 

At the present time we are working seventy head of 
horses on the farm. These are all cared for and worked 
by the inmates without an officer over them, and neither 
our farm nor buildings are inclosed by so much as a fence. 
We lose very few prisoners by escaping, less on an average 
than two per month. Our results show that we get a fair 
day's work from each of our able-bodied inmates. 

I have handled prisoners for the past sixteen years, 
starting with the old-time methods of having a thirty-foot 
wall, cells, locks, and bars, with stripes for clothing, and 
when a prisoner was reported for failure to comply with 
some order he was taken into a room, his clothing removed, 
and he was lashed with a cat-o'-nine-tails by the officer who 
reported him, and I am convinced that the open-air method, 
with as few restrictions as possible, will give us better 
results from the standpoint of discipline and reformation. 

We handle our women prisoners from the City of Wash- 
ington with the same system of buildings as are provided 
for the men. The female department is managed by women, 
and the two institutions are some distance apart. The 
average population of the female department is about one 
hundred. The women do the laundry work and make the 
clothing for the population of the two institutions. In addi- 
tion, a number of them work on the lawn and in the garden, 
do the painting and other sanitary work about the buildings. 
The female department, like the male department, has 
neither cell, lock, nor bar; the buildings are one-story and 
have neither wall nor fence around them. We have handled 
more than 1,800 women in the past eighteen months and 
have lost only three by escaping. 

We have very little sickness. Our health record is 
due to the construction of the buildings, which gives open- 
air treatment with plenty of sunshine. Ninety-five per cent 
of our inmates, both male and female, show decided improve- 
ment both in their mental and physical condition. 

We are expecting to have passed by Congress soon a 
statute containing the principles of the indeterminate sen- 
tence and parole law to govern the time the inmates are to 
remain with us after they are sentenced. 

In the enactment of such a law three distinct depart- 



58 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

ments should be considered: probation, suspension, and in- 
determinate sentence and parole law. 

1. Probation shall provide an officer who shall investi- 
gate each person arrested and awaiting trial, and shall give 
to the court an impartial report and recommend whether 
the accused shall be paroled or sentenced. 

2. If the prisoner is found guilty, sentence may be sus- 
pended by the court, but if sentenced, then the indeterminate 
sentence must apply. 

3. When by good conduct, and after being in the insti- 
tution, the individual shows by his work, energy, and 
ability that he can stand alone, he should be granted a parole 
under the supervision of the management and a place of 
employment found for him for at least six months, during 
which time the management should keep in touch with him 
through an agent of the institution ; and after the parole of 
six months, if his work is satisfactory, he can be released. 

In the short space of two years and six months, with a 
daily average of four hundred prisoners, more than five 
hundred acres of land have been cleared ready for cultiva- 
tion, more than six miles of road built, dormitories and a 
model dining room for six hundred prisoners erected, also 
officers' quarters for housing sixty employees, washing and 
clothing room for six hundred prisoners, lounging room and 
library to accommodate the number of inmates we now have, 
and several miles of splendid sewerage constructed. We 
have now a water system with tanks holding 50,000 gallons 
of raw water, filtering plant and tank that will filter and 
hold more than this amount of water each day, a pumping 
plant built on the banks of the Occoquan River that will 
deliver to the institution 200,000 gallons of water per day, a 
steam plant that furnishes steam and hot water for the 
entire institution, and an electric light plant capable of 
lighting the buildings and grounds. 

More than 10,000 tons of fertilizer have been brought 
from the City of Washington to enrich the 500 acres of land, 
much of which will be cultivated this year by the inmates, 
producing all vegetables necessary for the use of the insti- 
tution. More than 1,000,000 feet of lumber has been cut 
with our own sawmill and used in the buildings. Pens to 



MODERN IDEAS OF ADMINISTRATION 59 

accommodate 250 hogs have been built, also a root cellar 
that will accommodate thousands of bushels of potatoes and 
other vegetables has been constructed at practically no cost. 
Hotbeds to raise tens of thousands of plants for our gardens 
have been made. A brick plant with a capacity of 40,000 
brick daily is in operation. In addition to brick, this plant 
can supply the City of Washington and the District with 
paving brick, partition tile, sewer tile, etc. — in fact, we have 
the machinery and the materials for producing all kinds of 
clay products. A stone crusher, capable of turning out for 
the District 200 yards of crushed stone daily, is in operation. 
When delivering this material the institution is credited by 
the department ordering same. Our industries alone will 
have an earning capacity of at least $100,000 per annum. 

We have completed a barn for the housing of our horses 
and the storing of forage. This building is 165 feet long 
and 64 feet wide, consisting of fireproof reenforced cement 
basement with a capacity for holding eighty head of stock. 
The second story is for grain, wagons, etc., of a sufficient 
capacity to accommodate the needs of the institution. In 
the third story there is room for storing 250 tons of hay. 
The material in the second and third stories of this building 
is of lumber, framing, and shingles cut by our own sawmill 
from timber on the farm. More than 100,000 shingles were 
required to cover the building. We have been a year build- 
ing the barn, but the work has all been done by prisoners 
with the exception of one officer who is a carpenter. This 
building represents an actual asset of $15,000 to the District, 
but has not cost in actual money more than $4,000. 

All labor going into this great amount of work has been 
done by the inmates of the institution. More than 7,100 
male and 1,400 female prisoners have been received since 
July 1, 1910, all of whom on their discharge had gained from 
one to fourteen pounds in weight. We have had a death rate 
of less than one-half of one per cent, with no stone walls, 
iron bars, or locks, and but few escapes; no dungeons, no 
corporal punishment, no cursing of prisoners by the officers, 
while scores of men work each day upon their honor with no 
officer over them. 

While the work of improving this farm at Occoquan goes 



60 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

on from year to year, hundreds of men who are the products 
of the saloon and immoral resorts in our cities will be given 
a helping hand with an abundance of fresh air and sun- 
shine while under sentence, will be taught that hard labor 
and honest toil are profitable to both mind and body, and 
will be returned to the city with new hope and ambition to 
become an asset instead of a liability upon the community. 

There is nothing like the work test to bring out the best 
that is in an individual, and it is this system we have inau- 
gurated at the workhouse. With the indeterminate sentence 
we will steadily and persistently apply the method until we 
can determine just when the individual is ready for parole. 
The fellow who has a constitutional aversion to industry 
will soon reveal his true character under this form of treat- 
ment, so we may easily know him and put him in a class 
under proper discipline, where he may be self-supporting 
while in an institution ; but if permitted to go at large, after 
serving a few days under a fixed sentence, he would at all 
times be a source of annoyance and expense to the com- 
munity wherever he may go. It is not necessary even with 
this class of subjects to humiliate or degrade them. It is 
far better to inspire and encourage them. With an in- 
definite sentence we will have time to give them a few 
months of wholesome diet, by which, with regular habits, 
honest work, sanitary buildings in which to be housed and 
clean clothing to wear, many of these apparently hopeless 
subjects can be made into better men and women. It is pos- 
sible through proper discipline and constant work to arouse 
in the lowest type of humanity confidence and self-respect. 

It was no doubt in the minds of those who are responsible 
for the establishment of the District of Columbia Workhouse 
on this 1,150-acre farm that great good would be accom- 
plished for the District as well as for those who were so 
unfortunate as to be confined here. Statistics gathered from 
3,500 unfortunate people sent to us during the year show 
that their passions, sexuality, gaming, and drinking caused 
their downfall. There is no treatment so good for the in- 
dividual who is weak in mind and body from these ex- 
cesses as the open air, wholesome food, and honest work. 
Experience teaches that it is next to a crime to turn back 



MODERN IDEAS OF ADMINISTRATION 61 

to society these weakened unfortunates at the expiration of 
a fifteen or thirty days' sentence, as is now being done in 
more than 2,000 cases each year. The principle of operating 
a penal institution under this law is no longer a theory, and 
States should not hesitate to place such laws upon their 
statute books. 

The time is coming when the District of Columbia Farm 
will be self-supporting, if not more. When it is, I believe an 
appropriation should be provided whereby the dependent 
families of the inmates, whether they be sent to us because 
of non-support or other violation of the statutes, should be 
paid a sum sufficient to provide in a comfortable manner 
for their support during the confinement of the offenders. 
If such a system were inaugurated, the financial benefit re- 
ceived by the family would only be a secondary considera- 
tion. The greater benefit would be the lasting impression 
made on the individual while at the institution, developing 
in him industrial habits and self-confidence which would 
help him to become a self-supporting citizen and capable of 
caring for his family after his release. This certainly would 
be true in 60 per cent of the cases we have, if there can be 
brought about a change in the penal code of the District, 
having the inmates committed on an indeterminate sentence 
rather than on a fixed sentence as is now being given. 

In conclusion, if these desired results are ever obtained 
in the handling of unfortunates, it will be through right 
treatment. There must be thorough investigation before 
the stain of a prison sentence is passed. In a great per cent 
of the cases of minor offenses, rather than give them a 
workhouse sentence, these unfortunates require nothing 
more than dismissal with a friendly word and encourage- 
ment from the court; or if in the judgment of the court they 
need supervision, then they should be turned over to a 
practical probation officer, who will see to it that it is not 
necessary to commit them to prison. Many of the cases that 
come to the police and criminal court for minor offenses 
only require supervision, change of surroundings, and a 
new home. Institutional treatment should be the last rem- 
edy. What we must do is to abolish the fixed sentence and 
to de-institutionalize our institutions, and finally these peo- 



62 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

pie must be made to feel, whether in an institution or out of 
one, that they are working for home-making. Our endeavor 
should be also to shorten the stay in the institution and 
lengthen the period of probation. 



THE PROTESTANT CHURCH AND SOCIAL WORK 

REV. CHARLES S. MACFARLAND, D.D., SECRETARY, THE FEDERAL 

COUNCIL OF THE CHURCHES OF CHRIST IN 

AMERICA, NEW YORK CITY 

There is no doubt that Father Dubois is justified in his 
large inclusion of Catholic charity and mercy under the gen- 
eral term of "social service.' , I should be misunderstood, 
however, if I did not make it clear that I am using the term 
in a different sense, with a predominating emphasis on 
social justice. In the background of my consciousness I 
am thinking of social service not so much as social repair 
as social reconstruction. 

It is not without significance to note that the framers 
of this program speak of the Protestant Church; and it is 
of interest and moment that the new age of the Church, 
marked by the deepening and now perfecting sense of social 
obligation, is also an era of cooperation and unification 
of Churches whose polities and doctrines have, until now, 
confused them in the very expression of their common 
moral, social, and, indeed, their spiritual consciousness. 

The relations of cause and effect are in this instance 
mutual and reciprocal. Social service has been able to 
assume its more commanding place within the Church be- 
cause of this deepening sense of unity in fatherhood and 
brotherhood, but undoubtedly still more has Christian unity 
advanced because the social obligation could not be met 
except by a united Church. 

While the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in 
America does not constitute, as yet, an all-inclusive Protes- 
tant Evangelical Church, it is a momentous, historic achieve- 
ment to unite in its official and organic cooperation thirty 



THE PROTESTANT CHURCH AND SOCIAL WORK 63 

denominations ; and in this the Church's social mission and 
that of uniting her forces were not only parallel and simul- 
taneous movements, but each was the cause of which the 
other was effect. How much farther we may go it is not 
easy yet to prophesy, but it may be that the call of social 
service may yet present tasks demanding a yet larger unity, 
and the blending of varying elements in this program may, 
in the providence of God, be a forecast and a prophecy. 

My message to this Congress this year will thus con- 
sider together these two interrelated and largely identical 
movements of Protestantism, Christian Unity and Social 
Service, which are becoming the two inseparable and incom- 
parable movements of the day and generation. 

We live in an era of consolidation and cooperation, of 
efficiency and progress, and we have learned that these are 
synonymous terms. None of us, in the ordinary interests 
of our common life, defends the original or aboriginal 
method of competition as against a cooperation which is 
good in its objective and intent. By efficiency we mean a 
scientific management, through the conservation of energy 
and the elimination of waste, by which we make the largest 
use of power and attain the greatest possible results from 
the smallest investment. 

One of our most startling discoveries is that we have 
been so sadly and thoughtlessly wasteful. We have wasted 
our mineral wealth, squandered our forests, and have 
allowed the mighty forces of our streams to run out into 
an un-needing sea. 

Worse still, in the development of industry, and by social 
neglect, we have wretchedly wasted our human power and, 
as our new legislation witnesses, we have been criminally 
prodigal with human life itself. We have poisoned, 
neglected, maimed, and mangled by our inefficient speeding 
up, by our twelve-hour days and seven-day weeks. While 
we have wasted the forests, that make the mines, we have 
also wasted by thousands our human brothers in the mines, 
have slaughtered and despoiled our women, and have con- 
sumed our babes beyond the count of Herod in our suffocated 
cities, while we had half a continent of fresh air. In our 



64 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

commercial development we have sacrificed innocent human 
life upon its altar and have given over our little children 
to an industrial Moloch with outstretched iron arms, saying, 
"Let little children come unto me, and forbid them not, for 
of such is the kingdom of Mammon." And if we, followers 
of Christ, are content to disavow the blame, let us remem- 
ber that in the same breath in which the Master said that 
to neglect these little ones was to forget himself, he also 
condemned men, in his most severe and solemn utterance, 
for the things they didn't do. 

But these are not an intimation of the worst of our 
dissipations, and indeed these wastes have been largely be- 
cause of a deeper and more serious prodigality. We have 
let the very light within us become darkness, and the sad- 
dest of them all has been the wanton waste of our moral 
powers, our finer emotions, and our religious enthusiasms, 
largely through sectarian divisions, denominational rival- 
ries, and unrestrained caprice, masking itself or deluding 
itself as a religious loyalty. 

If one-thousandth part of our effort for redemption had 
been given to prevention, we should not now stand as we do, 
trembling, shamefaced, and bewildered before the haggard 
results of our own social havoc. Our worst and our most 
wanton profligacy has been the casting to the four winds 
of our ultimate power, the power of our religious enthu- 
siasm and our spiritual impulse, because they were neither 
socially concentrated nor socially interpreted and applied. 

Let us for a moment face the facts. One of our most im- 
portant Christian endeavors is that of our home missions, 
which is nothing less than the undertaking of the conquest 
and the moral development of a new nation. It was the 
earliest and one of the most potent forms of social service 
on the part of the Church and it was the beginning of a 
multitude of new social movements. Its leaders, like Ober- 
lin, built roads and highways for religion and, like Marcus 
Whitman, blazed the trails of civilization across a continent. 
This work, however, the Church has recklessly attempted 
without serious forethought or prearranged plan. Some- 
times it has been carried on in conflict between the very 



THE PROTESTANT CHURCH AND SOCIAL WORK 65 

forces attempting it, and even when sympathetic it has not 
been cooperative. And the result, time upon time, has been 
that, like the intrepid discoverers in the antarctic seas, re- 
ligious enterprise has perished within the reach of plenty; 
just because it was not social. Three years ago the Com- 
mittee on Home Missions of the Federal Council of the 
Churches of Christ in America investigated the State of 
Colorado. One hundred and thirty-three communities were 
found, ranging in population from one hundred and fifty 
to one thousand souls, without Protestant Churches of any 
kind, one hundred of them being also without a Roman 
Catholic Church. And they were places of deep need in 
rural and mining sections. In addition to these there were 
four hundred and twenty-eight towns large enough to have 
post offices, but without any Churches, and whole counties 
were discovered without any adequate religious service. 

The seriousness of the other problem of overlapping is 
indicated by a town of four hundred people in the same State 
with four Churches, all supported by home mission aid, and 
this but one of many like it. 

This investigation was followed by the Home Missions 
Council in fifteen Western States, in what was called the 
Neglected Fields Survey. In one State seventy-five thousand 
people resided five miles or more from a church. A rich 
valley with a population of five thousand, capable of sup- 
porting fifty thousand people, had but one church. In an- 
other State fourteen counties had but three permanent 
places in each for worship. One county in another State had 
a rural population of nine thousand with no religious min- 
istry except that supplied by the Mormon hierarchy. An- 
other county with a rural population of eighteen thousand 
had regular services in only three of its school districts. 

And these are but hasty suggestions from this report, 
made, mark you, within the past two years. The social prob- 
lems raised by Home Missions have been a determining 
factor in the development of Christian unity. 

One of the finest expressions of our religious enthusi- 
asms has been the carrying of a Christian civilization to 
the peoples of the earth and the far-off islands of the sea. 

—5 



66 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

It is safe to say, in view of the marvelous things accom- 
plished in spite of our internecine ravages, that had there 
been united or federated effort, a Christian society would 
now be spread in social power over the whole earth. But 
we did not bring to the infant vision of the heathen a 
gospel. We brought Gospels. At least so it seemed to them. 

If we ourselves can see to-day the wrong of our sad 
and haggard divisiveness, what wonder that to the unculti- 
vated eyes and ears of the heathen it looked, not like the 
approach of human love, but, as it certainly did look to 
them, like the approach of those who could not truly love 
them if, as it seemed, they did not love each other? For 
half a century we went to the East, not with the persuasion 
of the tongues of Pentecost, but with the confusion of the 
tongues of Babel. 

What wonder that those who could not learn our lan- 
guage, and whose language we could not speak intelligently, 
seemed to find themselves under the necessity of acquiring, 
not one speech, but many new languages, in order that they 
might learn the vocabulary of our social brotherhood ? 

If waste is the cause of inefficiency, surely we have dem- 
onstrated it in our approach to the heathen world, and our 
deepest encouragement may perhaps be drawn from it, for 
if they could discover, as they finally did, what we were try- 
ing to say in so many confusing tongues, how simple is our 
task when we all come to speak one language and make it 
clear that we are there upon one holy mission ! 

The development of a new and complex social order 
about us was getting ready for the call of a persuasive and 
effective gospel. New foes were arising on every hand. 
They were all united, and we found ourselves facing feder- 
ated vice, the federated saloon, federated corruption in 
political life, federated human exploitation, and then all 
these together multiplied in one strong federation, the feder- 
ation of commercialized iniquity. All of these were bound 
together in a solemn league and covenant, and the reason 
they so confidently faced a derided Church was because they 
faced a divided one. 

On the one hand were the federations of labor and on 



THE PROTESTANT CHURCH AND SOCIAL WORK 67 

the other hand federations of capital, girding themselves for 
their terrific conflict, waiting the voice which should speak 
with power and influence, that should quell their human 
hatreds. 

Problems of social justice were looking to us with be- 
seeching voice, and we found ourselves obliged to face them, 
or, worse still, to shun them, with shame upon our faces and 
with a bewildered consciousness, because we had no common 
articulation of a code of spiritual principles or moral laws. 
Our spiritual authority was not equal to our human sym- 
pathy, because it was divided. 

On all these things we had a multitude of voices trying to 
express the same consciousness, but the great world of men 
did not know it. Why should they know it when we had not 
found it out ourselves? We spoke with voices, but not with 
a voice. 

We have not altogether passed this situation. Within 
the past few weeks I found in a near-by State a city with 
one saloon to every eighteen voters, filled with pool rooms 
and vicious amusement resorts, a city in which the number 
of illegitimate births reported during the year was appalling. 
And after I had met with the Protestant pastors of that 
city for a few hours I learned, to my amazement, that it 
was the first time that they had ever come together to con- 
sider their common problems. And not only that, but it was 
with exceeding difficulty that I then restrained them from 
engaging in a vicious controversy over a most trivial matter 
of procedure. 

Very nearly up to our own day the Church has faced 
united iniquity while there has been scarcely a city in which 
it could be said, in any real or serious sense, that its 
Churches moved as one great force. And in many a town 
and rural village we yet have Churches wearying themselves 
to death in a vain struggle for competitive existence, or suf- 
fering from that worst of diseases, to be "sick with their 
brothers' health." 

What wonder that we have lost, not only our Sabbath 
as a day of worship, but our Sunday as a day of rest! 
What wonder that we have lost our civic virtue! Why are 



68 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

we surprised that we have lost not only our temperance 
laws but also our temperate ways? Why should we be 
astonished that with the loss of these we have also lost our 
sons and filled our houses of refuge with our daughters? 
Why should we wonder that the rich have left us for their 
unrestrained, unholy pleasure and the poor because we had 
no united sense and power of social justice to restrain an 
industry that devoured widows' houses and that bound 
heavy burdens grievous to be borne, especially when this 
was sometimes done by those who for a pretense made long 
prayers? What wonder that, with disintegrated religions 
which gave no adequate sense of religion, the home should 
lose its sacredness and the family become the easy prey of 
easy divorce and of unholy marriage? Still we went on 
singing, "Like a mighty army moves the Church of God." 
And when we come to resolve it to its final analysis the 
only trouble was that we did not sing together. 

Leave for a moment the larger review and consider the 
work of our individual Churches and the loss of their con- 
stituency. I say the loss of their constituency because the 
Church cannot be said to gain or even hold its own if it 
simply fills its vacancies. Many Churches have marked time, 
year upon year, and thought that they were moving because 
they kept their feet in motion. 

The age became a migratory one. Here was a root dif- 
ficulty in our social disorder. The family left one city for 
another. It drifted, by the necessities of industry, from place 
to place. And because we had no provision for shepherding 
the sheep that left one fold for another, they wandered 
about just outside some other fold. If the family, say, 
from one Baptist Church moved near another Baptist 
Church, there was some hope. But in at least half the cases 
they did not. 

For a study in efficiency visit the average city on a Sun- 
day night and measure the power of, say, one thousand peo- 
ple, scattered among twenty-five or thirty churches, when 
they might, with the contagion of human impact, be gath- 
ered into one, with a manifold and constantly increasing 
power, which, with wise direction, would send them back 



THE PROTESTANT CHURCH AND SOCIAL WORK 69 

to fill the empty churches whence they came and to become 
and to exert a social conscience. 

As in the home mission fields, so in our cities. We have 
whole sections religiously dying and socially decaying be- 
cause they are without any Churches, while other sections 
right beside them die because they have too many Churches 
to be supported. Effective distribution is as yet, in every 
city, either an undiscovered art or at best a feeble effort. 
Our rural communities are in a like situation because there 
has been no concert of action. The so-called rural problem 
as a social perplexity has arisen almost entirely from the 
disunity of our religious forces, and we might as well 
admit it. 

Then, for many, many years we had fervently prayed 
that God would open the doors of the heathen world and let 
us in to take care of the heathen as our inheritance. God 
always gives us more than we ask; and so he not only did 
that, but he opened our doors and poured the heathen in 
upon us. When the immigrant came he became, as often 
as not, an American patriot before there was time for him 
to become an American citizen. He assimilated everything 
except our religious impulse. He learned the language of 
our daily speech because we have only one language to be 
mastered. But our religion presented to him too many 
tongues. And why should we wonder that he could not dis- 
tinguish between them? 

He met centrifugal forces which repelled and not a cen- 
tripetal force which might have been an irresistible attrac- 
tion. He found a united democracy and he became a part 
of it the day he landed. He saw the unity of ideal in our 
public schools, and he made it his own. And if we had met 
him with a united brotherhood of the Church, he would 
have felt the mass impact of religion as he felt everything 
else and he would have yielded to it. 

Why is it that we have not sooner found ourselves in all 
the pressing problems of social regeneration ? It is because 
we are still discussing our alleged differences which do not 
exist except in our discussion. The specious differentiation 



70 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

between personal regeneration and social salvation is a 
divergence purely in philosophy and not in fact. 

Then, to witness our initial attempts at integration. We 
began our interdenominational movements and organiza- 
tions. It was and it is a movement in the right direction, 
and yet it must be confessed that to-day one of the greatest 
problems of religious federation is the federation of these 
federations. 

Out of the force of the Church sprang our reform 
agencies, which were subject, not only to moral impulse, but 
also to human caprice, and another of our problems is the 
federating of all or the elimination of some of these. 

Then when we began our federative movements in local 
communities we simply multiplied our groups. The Bible 
classes of the community were formed into a federation; 
also the boys' clubs, the Church temperance groups, and the 
men's clubs. The ministers separated themselves off from 
their Churches, or assumed that they were their Churches, 
and formed ministerial associations, listened sometimes to 
papers on the authorship of the fourth Gospel, but only 
occasionally, and not with very serious intent, to the common 
problems of their community life. We had to begin this way 
because we were afraid of bringing the Churches themselves 
together. 

Every once in a while, generally not oftener than once 
in four or five years, the wave of evangelistic power would 
strike the community. The evangelist came, rallied the united 
forces of the Churches for a week, then went away, and we 
strangely supposed that what it was perfectly clear could 
be begun only by united action could be kept up and de- 
veloped without it, and the Churches fell apart sometimes a 
little farther than they were before. 

Meanwhile every force, every movement, every single 
group gathered to oppose the Church was making its com- 
mon compact with its common stock and its evenly divided 
dividends. 

The wonder is not that we have not gained more ground. 
We have here a wonderful testimony to the power of the 



THE PROTESTANT CHURCH AND SOCIAL WORK 71 

gospel and its unquenchable fire that the light of religion 
did not go out altogether. 

We give all sorts of reasons for it. But it was not be- 
cause we were not thinking right. It was not because we 
were not thinking alike. It was not because we were wor- 
shiping differently or because our polities were different. 
It was simply that we didn't work and act together upon 
the tasks in which we were in absolute agreement. We were 
confused in our self-consciousness. We conceived our 
Churches and our sects as ends in themselves, rather than as 
the means to the one end that we have always had in com- 
mon. We remembered that we were of Paul, or of Apollos, 
while we forgot that we were all of Christ, and that all 
things were ours. We were losing our lives because we were 
trying to save them. 

So much for the facts of history. Let us now seek the 
vision of prophecy. This reckless prodigality of moral 
power and spiritual impulse was not because the Church 
was becoming an apostate Church. It was not because she 
was leaving an old theology or because she was rejecting a 
new one. Taken as a whole, her views were becoming 
larger and her vision finer. In certain ways she was cre- 
ating greater forces. But her forces were spent because 
her attack on sin was not concerted, and because she was 
not conscious of her own inherent unity. The Church and 
ministry went on doing their unrelated work, gaining a 
keener moral sense and stronger ethical gospel. The Church 
and her gospel were creating the very unrest that was 
crying out for social justice. And even while the Church 
was losing the toilers she was preparing for their social 
emancipation. She was continually creating larger oppor- 
tunities which, however, she was failing to meet because of 
her divided moral forces. 

We now feel that something very different is to be done. 

It is interesting that the first serious movement toward 
federation was in the foreign field. The missionaries began 
to send back word that they could not make their way by 
using such confusing tongues. They sent imperative mes- 
sages to us that they must get together, not only in order 



72 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

to impress the gospel upon the heathen, but for their own 
self-preservation. Both Christian Unity and Social Service 
are largely reflex actions from the field of foreign missions. 

Now, throughout the heathen world we are rapidly multi- 
plying union Church movements. In India we have the 
South India United Church of nine different denominations, 
and another federation is under way in Central India. These 
foreign Federal Councils are being organized, not on the 
basis of common forms of worship, but are being grouped 
by the languages or dialects which their people speak. They 
are formed on social units. 

In West China a movement has in view one Protestant 
Christian Church for that entire important part of the new 
Chinese republic. The same story is coming back to us 
from Korea and the Philippines. Japan has dissolved its 
tentative and voluntary evangelical alliance and now has an 
official federation of eight denominations. 

Practically all of the mission schools are interdenomina- 
tional and federated. There come to my desk every week 
something like two hundred and fifty different home re- 
ligious publications, most of them being, or alleging to be, 
denominational organs. On the other hand, in the heathen 
field their publications are common and interdenominational. 
Thus are our little children leading us. 

In fact, if we should in this country only follow the 
example of the foreign field, we should make a progress that 
would surprise ourselves. The recent splendid call of the 
republic of China for the prayers of the Christian Churches 
of China and the world is the clear issue of a social gospel. 

The main point, however, upon which we are finding 
our most common approach is in the new emphasis which 
we are giving, because we are forced to give it, to the 
nearer social problems of our day. Here, at least, we find 
no true reason for differentiation. No one will argue that 
there are Methodist Episcopal saloons ; or such a thing as 
Baptist child labor, or Congregationalist vice, or Presby- 
terian sweatshops, or Episcopal Tammany Halls. 

Not only do we thus find no sensible reason for division, 
but we have very quickly discovered that we shall meet this 



THE PROTESTANT CHURCH AND SOCIAL WORK 73 

opportunity in unity or else we shall not meet it at all. 
Social regeneration must have a social approach. The social 
tasks and problems of a city cannot be met by any Church 
except in common conference with every other Church. 

This application of the gospel to the needs of the world 
is what is giving us our unity. When we get together upon 
our common task, we cannot help forgetting, for the time 
being at least, the things which have divided us because we 
find ourselves in unity upon those two laws upon which 
Jesus said the whole law and the prophets hung, on love 
to God and love to man. We are facing our common foe of 
commercialized vice, of human exploitation together, and 
we are receiving abuse. As we stand side by side it be- 
comes impossible for us to do anything but love our fellow 
Christians, and we are willing that they should make their 
intellectual expression of religion according to their own 
type of mind, and that they should worship after their own 
forms and customs. 

We have made, only within the past few days, another 
great discovery. We have discovered that evangelism and 
social service are not only inseparable now and forever, but 
are one and the same. In other words, when we get together 
seriously upon the work of social service we find that we are 
together upon what we thought was the remote work of 
evangelism. 

The evangelist is to proclaim the full Fatherhood of 
God-— a God who rules his household with the unwavering 
hand of justice and with a heart of love. Thus the invoca- 
tion of the heavens for divine justice and the cry of an 
Infinite affection meet and mingle with every human cry 
that rises upward for human justice or of human suffering. 
A true father will not let his children hurt each other, either 
by malice or neglect, and he does not love the strong child 
better than he does the weak. 

We feel a deeper and more tormenting sense of sin, a 
profounder consciousness of the eternal truth, that a sin, 
whether of indifference or intent, against our brother or 
our sister, is an offense against an outraged and righteously 
indignant God, that social morals and personal religion are 



74 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

one and inseparable now and forever, and that God is not 
a seller of indulgences at any price. 

The third article of our evangelical message is the abso- 
lute certitude of judgment. Shall not God avenge those 
whose cries come up to him day and night? Yea, speedily 
he shall avenge them. 

The final message is redemption, the redemption of the 
individual in the world, and through him of the world itself, 
and there is no redemption of either without the redemption 
of the other. 

The gospel is outgrown, the Christian pulpit is super- 
fluous, the Church of the living Christ goes out of existence 
when the truths of the gospel, the vocabulary of the preach- 
er, and the constitution of the Church no longer contain the 
words "God," "sin," "judgment," and "redemption," and 
they are gigantic and capacious words, belonging to a vocab- 
ulary that can interpret the whole universe of right and 
wrong, both individual and social. They are applicable to 
every problem in God's world. Thus nearly all the things 
belong together that we have thought apart. 

In fact, we have discovered that while we were praying 
for a revival of religion we were really in the midst of 
what promises to be one of the greatest revivals that this 
world has ever known. Our present sensitive social con- 
science simply means that we have a "second blessing" and 
that we are again passing through the experience of religion. 
How on earth can there be any jot or tittle of difference be- 
tween saving one man at a time or saving two? between 
regenerating an individual and sanctifying a whole city full 
of individuals? 

The only difference between a true social evangelism and 
what we used to consider by that word is that the mourners' 
bench and mercy seat are full. We come, not one by one, 
but all are on our knees together. True social service is 
simply evangelism a hundred or a thousand fold. 

Is it any less holy to crush out a den of vice than it is to 
regenerate a vicious man? Here again our differences are 
only in our use of terms, and not in reality and fact. Go to 
commercialized vice and to industrial injustice and say to 



THE PROTESTANT CHURCH AND SOCIAL WORK 75 

them, "We will make the laws tighter," and they will answer, 
"Very well, we will find ways to break them." Go and say 
to them, "We will make our courts stronger," and they will 
answer to themselves, if they do not to us, "The political 
power of our money is stronger than any court of justice." 

But suppose you could go to them and say, "The 
Churches of this city, all of them, have gotten together. 
They are thinking, planning, and moving as one man to 
crush you." They might doubt it; but if they did not doubt 
it, they would fear it as they have not feared even the 
Almighty himself. 

Now for these common tasks we are discovering, faster 
than we admit it, and we are conscious of it faster even than 
we express it to ourselves, that for these common missions 
we require no changes of our symbols or of the intellectual 
expression of our religious faith. We have passed the 
periods of both division and of toleration and we are enter- 
ing that of serious cooperation. While Christian unity as a 
sentiment is everywhere in the air, it is taking perhaps two 
concrete forms. 

The first is that which finds expression in such move- 
ments as the Christian Unity Foundation and the proposed 
World Conference of Faith and Order. But there is another 
form of Christian unity which is possible without waiting 
for any Conference on Faith or Order. The principle of 
evolution is that of passing from the indefinite, incoherent, 
homogeneous to the definite, coherent, heterogeneous. That 
is simply to say that denominationalism may be considered 
as a mark of human progress. Denominationalism and sec- 
tarianism are not the same thing. 

Diversity rather than uniformity is the expression of 
evolution. But God has put into our human order another 
principle of progress together with that of diversity; and 
everywhere in the order which he has made we find mingling 
together unity and diversity. 

I think that the movement of which the Federal Council 
of the Churches of Christ in America is the most concrete 
expression is an illustration of this principle of progress. 
Federal unity is, I think, stronger and more vital than any 



76 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

other form of unity now possible, because it is unity with 
freedom and because unity is stronger without uniformity 
than with it. Federal unity is a larger immediate possi- 
bility than the unity of faith and order, because it is so 
much simpler a process. It takes less time. We may all 
join ourselves to the common task and gird our garments 
just as strong whether or not our outward habiliments are 
just alike. 

Getting together in action saves a tremendous amount 
of the time unnecessarily spent in mental processes, because 
by getting together in action we find that we really are 
thinking alike without taking the time to do it by a philo- 
sophical process. I am sometimes asked if I think it prob- 
able that the thirty denominations which are the constituent 
bodies of the Federal Council will hold together in perma- 
nent unity, and my answer is this: There is less differ- 
entiation and distance between the two remotest bodies now 
in that Council than the differentiation and distance between 
the two wings of any one of these denominations. That is 
to say, we are closer together in this larger inclusiveness 
than we are within ourselves. 

I should be willing to predict that within ten years there 
will be no self-respecting city where the Churches are not 
bound together in some form of effective federation. 

Federal unity, however, recognizes the two principles 
of progress, differentiation and coherence. It recognizes 
that the kingdom of God does not mean solitariness on the 
one hand or uniform consolidation on the other. It is simply 
genuine cooperation without regard to the ultimate result 
upon ourselves. It is not trying to get men to think alike 
or to think together. It is willing that the army should be 
composed of various regiments with differing uniforms, with 
differing banners, and even, if necessary, with different 
bands of music at appropriate intervals, provided they move 
together, face the same way, uphold each other, and fight 
the common foe of the sin of the world with a common love 
for the Master of their souls, for each other, and for man- 
kind. 

Such a Church is absolutely irresistible. According to 



THE PROTESTANT CHURCH AND SOCIAL WORK 77 

biblical arithmetic, if one can chase one thousand, two can- 
not only put twice as many but ten thousand to flight ; and 
if you multiply according to this arithmetic until you reach 
the twenty million Protestant Church members in this 
country, you can gain some estimate of what God intends 
that we should do. 

I have discovered, I think, this interesting fact: that it 
is possible, almost always, to get the Churches into Chris- 
tian unity, provided you can prevent them from discussing 
Christian unity. I am not asking men any more to come 
together from the various Churches to hold a conference 
with me on the question of Christian unity. I am willing 
to talk with them upon almost any other subject but that. 
The important thing is to get them together to show them 
the common social task — a task which absolutely cannot be 
done unless they do it together — and leave them to draw 
their own inference as to their duty, and as to the will of 
God and the Spirit of Christ. 

The social task of the Protestant Church and its call 
for united action are one and inseparable, now and forever. 

The men and women of this Congress, who have been 
showing the Church her social obligation, have builded 
better than they knew. In their revelation of her social 
task they have been uniting her divided forces. Meanwhile 
the Church has been the archcreator of the deepest and the 
greatest of the social problems which now demand that she 
act as one great sosial power. When the task is completed 
and she becomes the conscience, the interpreter, and the 
guide of the social order, and when the spiritual authority 
which she possesses is translated into one common tongue 
and her voices become one mighty voice, the gates of hell 
shall no longer prevail against her, and she will be no longer 
weak and helpless before the hagsrard, sullen, and defiant 
face of injustice, inhumanity, and heartless neglect, and 
she will be able to take care of all her children— and her 
children are humanity. 

Finally, then, brethren, the creative work of home mis- 
sions can be conceived, to-day and to-morrow, only by a 



78 THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL SERVICE 

Protestant Church with the social vision and impulse, and 
can only be performed by unity and comity. 

And only by these selfsame tokens can the heathen 
lands be redeemed ; the heathen of those lands who come to 
us be shaped into a Christian democracy; the Christian 
Sabbath be saved; the Christian home preserved in sacred 
purity; our boys delivered from the hosts of sin; our girls 
delivered from the lust of men ; the people redeemed from 
injustice and oppression; our evangelism be redemptive, and 
the Christian Church itself saved from becoming atrophied 
and from the contempt of the world; by an immediate 
sweeping social vision and an instant sense of genuine and 
earnest unity, through which and by which only her spirit- 
ual authority can make the kingdoms of this world the 
kingdom of our Lord. 



THE CALL OF THE NEW SOUTH 79 



"THE CALL OF THE NEW SOUTH" 

This book is the proceedings of the first session 
of the Southern Sociological Congress, held in Nash- 
ville May 7-10, 1912. It contains 387 pages beauti- 
fully printed and handsomely bound in cloth. It has 
forty-one addresses by experts on such subjects as 
Child Welfare, Courts and Prisons, Public Health, 
Negro Problems, Enemies of the Home, Education 
and Co-operation, the Church and Social Service, 
and the Qualifications of Social Workers. 

There are only a few copies of this book left. If 
you are fortunate enough to have the book, you 
should hold on to it, for soon it will be impossible 
to secure a copy. It is the first book of this wonder- 
ful movement, and is more and more appreciated as 
the movement develops. As long as our supply holds 
out you may get a copy for $2 from the office of 
the Southern Sociological Congress, 323 Sixth Ave- 
nue North, Nashville, Tenn. 



Y0IT AEE INVITED TO JOIN THE SOUTH- 

EEN SOCIOLOGICAL CONOEESS 



PITEPOSE 

"To study and improve social, civic, and economic conditions in 
the South." 

SLOGAN 

"The solid South for a better nation." 

PLATPOEM 

"Brotherhood." 

OBJECTIVE 

"To enlist the entire South in a crusade of social health and 
righteousness." 

HISTOEY 

Inaugurated by Gov. Ben W. Hooper, of Tennessee; founded 
by Mrs. Anna Russell Cole, of Nashville ; supported by the 
hearty co-operation of all Southern Governors, save one ; 
presided over during 1913 by Gov. William H. Mann, of Vir- 
ginia; held second Congress in Atlanta April 25 to 29 with over 
1,000 delegates in attendance; 96 specialists in sociology on pro- 
gram conducted six simultaneous Conferences for four days on 
Public Health, Courts and Prisons, Child Welfare, Organized 
Charities, Race Problems, and the Church and Social Service. 

PROCEEDINGS 

All the important addresses and findings of the Atlanta Congress 
are now being published in a handsomely bound volume of 
about 500 pages, entitled "The South Mobilizing for Social 
Service." It is a library in itself on up-to-date studies of South- 
ern sociological questions. It will be sent free to members. 
Additional copies can be secured for $2 each by ordering im- 
mediately. The supply is limited. 

To J. E. McCulloch, General Secretary Southern 
Sociological Congress, Nashville, Tenn.: 

Please enroll the following name as a member of the Sociological 
Congress, for which I ( A wi£Kf D G ) membership fee of $2. 

Name 

Address - 

Date ~ _ 

P. S. — Also send me..... .additional copies, for which I will 

remit $2 each on receipt of the books. 

Libraries may hold membership in the Congress. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



027 293 705 9 



